New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Codebase at my work is a complete mess, what should I do?

Ask HN: Codebase at my work is a complete mess, what should I do?
156 by anonR4nd0m | 164 comments on Hacker News.
Recently I joined a relatively small company (50-100 employees) as a medium level software developer. For a while I was very excited about this opportunity. After few days/weeks of getting to know the whole codebase I finally moved to a specific project I was suppose to work on and I found out the code is a complete mess. Often I find parts of code that unintentionally affects other parts of code. Some parts are just copied and left there doing nothing. Even names of classes/variables are sometimes useless and project structure is unintuitive and seemingly without rules. It's spaghetti and relatively big spaghetti (tens of thousands of LOC). I started "repairing" the project but there're no tests to check whether my adjustments are correct.

I'm so frustrated and depressed by it. The job basically turned into something I hate - I'm just rewriting the code! The person in charge of this project was working on it alone and from the outside it all looks fine and it's working. So this makes the higher people think that it's all just fine. I really don't know what to do. Should I just go and basically say that this person did a bad job? I don't feel very comfortably doing that because (a) I'm a relatively new hire, (b) the person in charge is working there for about two years and (c) I'm much younger than she/he is both professionally and biologically. I've already made some comments about rewriting it and the response was basically "ok".