Roy Tang

Someone on quora asked:

How does a senior developer deal with a poorly organized startup?

Startups tend to have smaller dev teams, so as a senior developer in a start-up, you have a unique opportunity to influence the startup’s development culture and determine what kind of company it will be. I would suggest sitting down with whoever is your superior - maybe that’s the CEO or the CTO - and telling them your concerns and why improving the quality of the codebase should be a priority. You don’t have to convince them to do a full-scale refactoring or something like that. If you find it difficult to sell the idea because it would cost too much effort, feel free to suggest smaller-scale incremental changes to at least make sure new code is written up to better standards.

Finally, your talk with the higher-ups should give you a good idea of what their priorities are for the startup and whether they value the same things you do. And if your values don’t align, it’s a good sign that you should consider looking for other opportunities