I realized to work in an office with a quite bad code base. The base library implemented in years and years is quite limited, and most of that code is, honestly, horrible. Projects developed in the office are very large.

Fine.

I could define me a "perfectionist" (but often I'm not), and I thought to refactor an application (really a portion), which need a new (complex) feature. But, today, I really realized that it's not possible to refactor that application modules with a reasonable time (say, 24/26 hours, respect the avaialable time for the task, which is 160 hours).

I'm talking about (I am a bit ashamed to say) name collisions, large and frequent cut & paste code, horrible and misleading naming, makefiles without dependencies (!), application login is spread randomly across many different sources, dead code, variable aliasing, no assertion, no documentation, very long source files, bad/incomplete include file definition, (this is emblematic!) very frequent extern declaration of variables and functions, ... I'm sure to continue ... buffer overflows because sprintf, indentation (!), spacing, non existent const modifier usage. I would say that every source line was written quite randomly when needed, without keeping in mind some design (at least, the obvious one).

(Am I in hell?)

The problem arises when the application is developed by a colleague of mine. I felt very frustrated. So, I decided to expose the "situation" to my colleague; at the end, that was a bad idea.

He is justified in saying that "the application was developed in haste, so it is natural that it is written vaguely; you are wasting time to think and implement an elegant implementation"

....

I'm asking too much from my colleague to write readable code, which is managed and documented? I expect too much in not having to read thousands of lines of code to understand how a particular logic?