So I've been promoted to Chief Developer/Product Manager of one of the core in-house codes we use at work. I am coming from a user position to the dev position. This code is hated amongst the users. When it works, it works well, but you have to babysit everything. All us users have our own versions of the code, because we've had to fix or change something. I personally don't think the science behind the code is the best either. It's a mess of F77, F90, F95, F2003, Python, and C. Why? That seems so overly complicated. The Fortran 2003 stuff seems to serve no purpose other than to make the code uncompilable with gfortran.
So, since the guy I'm replacing went to a competitor, he was kicked out of the building when he quit (to his great surprise). I've been named the new guy, but ... they really haven't told me what to do. They brought back in the old guy for a one-day sit down, but I really don't know what to ask at this point. I saw his timeline for completion, and it is odd. He had 45 days slated for something that I think could be done in 2 at most, and I showed him how on the whiteboard. They want to spend forever parallelizing, which, let's be honest, ain't that hard for a sequential process like this one.