[crate_barre]

As someone who is miserable on a similar project, the best thing you can do is give ample breathing room for the labor. The codebase is stress inducing, so being empathetic on deadlines and and what may appear to be shifting attitudes (good days, bad days) means a lot. Give off days early, try to make sure people pace themselves.

Otherwise they’ll burnout and the resentment of the state of the codebase will be jet fuel to that brand new revolving door on your team.

Commiserate to some degree, ‘look, I know this shit sucks’. If they don’t know you empathize, they won’t trust you.