While I am not immune to the failing of writing bad/smelly/suboptimal code by accident (and I wish otherwise), it really grates my cheese to do so deliberately/knowingly under instruction from people whom are paying me for my professional expertise and skill, while exhibiting little to none of it themselves. You might not realise it, but every time you ask me to knowingly do something bad, I deliberately decrease my productivity by putting that task at the bottom of my list of priorities. It's a very long list, most of the time, believe me. I do not take being pushed around and compromising my principles and standards lightly. There will be negative consequences and they will go hard for you. I'm stubborn like that. I've also had years of practice procrastinating.

Obligatory applicable O'Rly? fake book cover

There are certain things on which I am willing to compromise for the sake of getting a paycheck, but there are certain things on which I am not. Keeping your existing bad code and following your "standards" that flout convention is one of the former, but knowingly writing and committing slow/under-performant new code on purpose is not. That's not doing my best work, not by a construction worker's hard hat. (The aim of development is to remove bugs, not create places for them to stay and invite them to show up in future!) Do not push me on this, if you hope to get any productive work out of me; it simply won't happen. You might not want to do professional development, but I do. That is the basis on which I agree to work for companies, not this nonsense. I hold myself to higher standards, because my reputation as a competent developer is important to me. It underpins my ability to get freelance work to begin with.

Brick Top: Do you know what "nemesis" means? A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent. Personified in this case by an 'orrible cunt... me.

You know that thing about writing code as if the next person to work on it is a homicidal psychopath who knows where you live and has poor impulse control? That applies here. If you want to be difficult and obstructive, then I am more than happy to meet you half way and be unproductive. I can drag this out for as long as you're willing to pay me to (which could very well be years). Alternately, we do things my way and you let me get on with it. If that doesn't work for you, find someone else whom is easier to manipulate and is more willing to tolerate your bullshit. If you consider that approach to be me having a bad attitude, then I don't want to have a good one just to earn some money. As far as I'm concerned, there are more important things in life than selling one's services to absolutely anyone willing to pay me to do a bad job. My lecturers didn't take pains to drum into me good practice just so I'd throw it out the window at any opportunity to stuff my wallet. It's why my services don't come cheap.

One of the conditions of my freelancing is that I'm responsible for my own work. That means that I get the freedom to do things my way for the sake of maintaining my tenuous sanity, within reason, or not at all. Had I known that I wouldn't be allowed to do that when I approached Bluebox looking for work and discussed it over email, I would have stated as much, declined and carried on looking for work. It didn't occur to me that I would have to. I assumed, clearly incorrectly, that an international development company would hire competent professionals (and, frankly, that they'd be better at it than I am). Oh, what a mistake to make! You claim your staff stick around for an average of three years. I suspect that's because they struggle to find work elsewhere. Frankly, if I had the choice/option, I'd be gone in three weeks! 1/10: Strongly don't recommend.

Enough is enough. I am very rapidly reaching the point where I give in to the strong temptation to run the PHP FIG PSR & Symfony coding standards conformance checker tool on the entire smelly code base (or at least on  as much of it as to which I have access) and refactor it to my satisfaction, before I do anything else. Maybe then, I might actually be able to do productive work without being frustrated and losing what little of my hair and sanity I have left (which isn't much after continuously making mistakes that lead to work environment/relationship situations like this one). I suggest that you don't push me to that. I'm sure that's a very necessary evil you want to postpone for as long as you can because of the upfront performance hit and impact on the business' bottom line. The irony is that, by adding/keeping bad code, you're exacerbating the problem which is going to come back to bite you at some point. It's only going to compound the problem until you fix it. Trust me on this; I know from experience. (The code needs a hell of a lot more than simply quoting array attributes if you want to transition it to PHP 8. It doesn't even use namespaces, which have been part of the language since PHP 5.2, but global variables are everywhere!) You might as well start that sooner, rather than later. The longer you ignore and leave problems, the worse they will get, right? Having thought about the issue and slept on it, I have decided that's what's best for me, if not for you. However, my time would be better spent looking for work elsewhere, but the crucial thing is that I need the money. You can pay me to improve the code or you can pay me to add quality code (either one to the best of my ability), but definitely not to knowingly write rubbish. I've spent five years finding and eliminating bugs as a full-time job. While I can't guarantee I'll do that for all of them (since there's always room for improvement and code bases are large and complex), I'd like to think I'm fairly good at debugging (at least far more than I am at enbugging). It's frustratingly tedious, slow-going and largely unrewarding work. I will not voluntarily create more of it for myself or anyone else. I've got more enjoyable ways to waste my time (like ranting about software development instead of learning how to be better at it, for example). The choice is yours. Otherwise, I should just cut my losses and go back to job hunting.