That being said, bear in mind that not everyone holds themselves to the same high ideal that you apparently hold yourself. And not everyone has to. Until you become a supervisor or technical lead, you are only responsible for your won work, and that is the best place to focus your energies. I recognize the code you are trashing there, not by having seen that exact code, but by having seen very similar code at my present employer.

The fact is, we have some great programmers, very talented people who would dearly love to go back and re-work some of the code that they wrote when first learning perl. I'd love to have the luxury of going back and re-doing a lot of my code. Hwever, reality dictates that since "the old code works", we focus on what is before us today,and if we have some spare cycles at some point, we go back and clean up some of that old stuff. Or when the requirements change and we have a chance to get back in there, we clean it up.

Pick your battles too. I'd say that version control should be the first thing you attack. You can probably enlist the aid of the sysadmins in getting CVS installed on a development server, unless the sysadmins are in on the crappy code conspiracy too. They usually love the idea of not having to restore things from back up if they don't have to. Failing that, install it in a private bin directory and just start using it yourself.

As to guns-a-blazing, I would never even consider it. Not my style at all. I just try to write the best code I know how, influence not force, and flow over and around the rocks, wearing them down rather than trying to move them. Now after a year on my job, I'm getting promoted and being made technical lead on my team.