I just got off a short contract where this exact thing happened. The company had a MVP they were using that was made by the founders. They were obviously young and inexperienced. The code was awful to say the least. I told them straight up it would be best to just throw all this code away and start again from scratch. Its best to do it now while the company is young, rather than much later. They were neck deep in technical debt.
They claimed it would take "a really long time" to rewrite everything. I can understand a junior developer thinking that (it apparently took them 2 years to create the code they were using at that point). But using good engineering practices, building a site that did what they needed could have been done within a few weeks using Django and MySQL. Its really hard to make this point stick when you're dealing with developers in that "sophomore zone" of programming ability.
Needless to say, they told me "no way jose". I ended it with them right then and there. I can't tell you how many times I've seen that happen.
They claimed it would take "a really long time" to rewrite everything. I can understand a junior developer thinking that (it apparently took them 2 years to create the code they were using at that point). But using good engineering practices, building a site that did what they needed could have been done within a few weeks using Django and MySQL. Its really hard to make this point stick when you're dealing with developers in that "sophomore zone" of programming ability.
Needless to say, they told me "no way jose". I ended it with them right then and there. I can't tell you how many times I've seen that happen.