I've always found discussing why former employees left a project incredibly enlightening. They will usually explain the reality behind the PR given they are no

I've always found discussing why former employees left a project incredibly enlightening. They will usually explain the reality behind the PR given they are no longer involved in the politics. Most importantly they will often tell you your best case future with a firm. Normally, employment agreements specifically restrict contact with former staff, or discussions of sensitive matters like compensation packages. C++ is like any other language, in that it will often take 3 times longer to understand something than re-implement the same. If you are lucky, than everything is a minimal API lib, and you get repetitive examples of the use cases... but the cooperative OSS breadcrumb model almost never happens in commercial shops... Legacy code bases can be hell to work with, as you end up with the responsibility for 14 years of IT kludges. Also, the opinions from entrenched lamers on what productivity means will be painful at first. Usually, with C++ it can become its own project specific language variant (STL or Boost may help wrangle the chaos). You have my sympathy, but no checklist can help with naive design inertia. Have a wonderful day. =)