All projects I have done for the first ten or so years of my commercial work have been picking up an ancient code base long after the original team has left, an

All projects I have done for the first ten or so years of my commercial work have been picking up an ancient code base long after the original team has left, and making it work. I reserved the nice and clean code for my personal hobby projects. At work, it was about getting the shit from the past working and maybe improve it a little along the way. You even adopt the coding style you hate, just to minimize diffs and making it easier to navigate the history.