Help. I'm drowning in spaghetti code

I've been working at a working student (15 hours/ week) at a local software company for about a month now... and with everything I learned at college I'm kind of getting eye cancer here.
We still use SVN
We don't have any coding guidelines. No checkstyle, no overview over the program. When I started there I was just giving a ticket and they said good luck.
We just have some basic RCPTT Tests inside Eclipse and most of Themen don't work in the trunk because the gui got changed...
At least we have a ticket system but it doesn't get used by most of the working students.
I found 10 other bugs while reproducing and trying to fix 1 bug.
And I've never seen Java raped so badly. Today I saw a line that started with 6 brackets because whoever wrote it wanted to cast like there was no tomorrow. I see more instanceof in one day than in my whole devlife before.
The only thing we have is two normal employees that review our code before we are allowed to commit it into the trunk.
So yeah... I'm drowning in spaghetti-code.

I like style checkers. I really do. I may not agree with any of the rules they force upon the rules, but I will bury that for consistent code. That said, why, oh why, does this damn thing have to fail out the build rather than just warning me in the IDE. This fucker takes 15 minutes to build and when it fucks the build, it's a huge waste of time.

That said, anyone know how to get check style rules out of Maven and put them in IntelliJ? Myself and my team would love you forever.

Java developers not correctly formatting their code. Like, guys, seriously...your IDEs do that for you and it saves me from having to look at checkstyle complaining for a million lines....

checkstyle errors, turns out to be a config with only 2 spaces for an indentation instead of 4.

What do you guys think of forced linters (checkStyle) on java assignments?

At this University we have a submission system that checks for your code where if a line didn't match the coding specification then it's an instant zero.

Being experienced in programming before going to a university, this somewhat surprised me, it also has unit tests implemented in it where it checks against input and output.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Is it too much for people who unlike me never seen code before? Or let them have hell and understand how to deal with it? I personally think it's too much for beginners.

Immediately after the last major release, I enabled CheckStyle to fail on unused methods and variables, and then I proceeded to delete all dead code. The test suite passed and I got approval to merge. Two months later, the next major release went out the door…guess how that went :)

Using TDD or at the very least writing unit tests ensures your code won’t break, or go missing!