[ChrisMarshallNY]

> I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline!

One of my first coding jobs, was maintenance programming a 1970s-vintage FORTRAN IV codebase (primitive email system).

Over 100KLoC of slop-quality pasta. Not one single comment. No subroutines, 2-character variable names, etc. The original author was around, but it was worth your job to bother him. I was better off, using a Ouija board, to contact his father.

That informed my approach, for the rest of my life.