> SOme people are really precious about their shitty code and can't take criticism, esepcially in small companies.

It's very easy to criticize, often not easy to understand the situation where the bad code was written. Maybe the hastily-written code was the thing that saved a company from bankruptcy and was written by dedicated engineers, and bringing your friend to fix it was the plan all along, and what they needed was someone to fix the code and not decry everybody as stupid.

[I'm not saying this is what actually happened to your friend. I don't know your friend :)]