I'm part of an organization that is working on an ecom startup project for a client in providing them support, maintenance and new features for their legacy codebase. The client is not of a very technical bent of mind, and expects things to be completed quickly and any risks/threats/issues posted by us to him are quite simply ignored by his stock response: "Well, facebook/twitter/linkedin seem to be able to do this, and quite quickly too. Why can't you?" We do explain to him that those companies he mentions have a large IT budget and staff and go through endless cycles of development and QA before anything is pushed to live, but to not much avail.
Now to the question. The codebase is quite a mess, and as we go on, it keeps on getting messier. I, as a senior developer have requested our client and our management team to look into a rewrite or atleast an optimization, but I hit a brick wall with each. The management is happy as long as the things keep on working, and so is the client, but I know that we're just getting deeper into trouble as we go on. Working on an already horrible code mess depresses me each day, and things are only going to grow worse. One option I've thought of, is to clean the codebase myself personally in my freetime, and then present them with a beta. Any suggestions?
