I won't tell tales about my current employer, but I'll tell the one about my previous one (without naming them).
I left because the code base for their main product was incredibly bad. Brittle, opaque, undocumented, buggy, and virtually unmaintainable.
That alone wouldn't have been a dealbreaker as long as the company saw the problem and we were working to fix the situation. That wasn't what was happening, though, because the Big Boss didn't agree that there was a problem at all, even though literally every dev was telling him so. He saw any effort to improve the code quality as a waste of time and money.
So, I had to leave in part because it was a terrible working condition, and in part because I didn't want my personal professional reputation to be damaged by being associated with that project.
By instituting a "minimal change" rule. No code changes were allowed for general refactoring. If you're fixing a bug, only the bare minimum changes to address it were allowed.
If fairness, the rule was not entirely irrational. It was very difficult to make changes that didn't break stuff all over the place, and "minimal change" helped to reduce the short-term risk.
This did allow some refactoring to get sneaked in, of course -- sometimes a bug required rearchitecting code, which comes with the opportunity to refactor. And if you're adding a new feature, the new code can be properly done.
> Was your boss a super dev reading the code and calling out if it looked better?
Pretty much. He was involved in all code reviews. He single-handedly wrote the initial implementation, and I believe that he took any criticism of it, overt or implied, as a personal attack.
The truly scary part of this (for me) is that this is an enterprise product that is pretty widely used by major corporations in system-critical deployments.
I left because the code base for their main product was incredibly bad. Brittle, opaque, undocumented, buggy, and virtually unmaintainable.
That alone wouldn't have been a dealbreaker as long as the company saw the problem and we were working to fix the situation. That wasn't what was happening, though, because the Big Boss didn't agree that there was a problem at all, even though literally every dev was telling him so. He saw any effort to improve the code quality as a waste of time and money.
So, I had to leave in part because it was a terrible working condition, and in part because I didn't want my personal professional reputation to be damaged by being associated with that project.