I am currently doing some contract work for a company. Now they want to hire me for real. I have been reading on SO about code smells lately.
The thing is, I have worked with some of their code and it smells. Badly. They use incredibly old versions of MSVC (2003), they do not seem to use version control systems, most code is completely undocumented, variable names with more than three letters are a rarity, there is commented out code all over the place, some methods take huge amounts of arguments, UI design is seemingly done by blind people... Yet they seem to be quite successful with what they do and their actual algorithms seem to be pretty sound and rather sophisticated. Since they mostly do DSP stuff, I am willing to ignore the UI side of things, but really these code smells are worrying.
What would you think of a company that doesn't seem to value readable code? The people are nice enough and payment would be good. How much would you value code smells in this context?
You see, this is my first job and SO got me worried, so I turn to you for suggestions ;-)
