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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

Both of these are important observations. And, as far as I can tell, both of them exist largely because of corporate politics.

If you could design a corporate culture that minimized the incentives towards both, I think you'd be a long way towards having a more sustainable company viz technology.

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There was one time (2006 at a company of less than 50 people) where I absolutely refused to build the new pricing features in a billing system (which would have been a big hack on a long series of smaller hacks) unless they let me refactor it (meaning rebuild it from scratch). After waiting for a few months without their new pricing features they finally gave in. That's at a young, nimble company where the co-CEO had a programming background. I can only imagine how hard a fight that would be at a larger, slower company.

I've worked for a government data center where they ran instances of Ultrix in a commercial VM to run old data processing software that ingested and barfed out CSVs that contained UUencoded blobs of image data. All this was written in a mixture of very very old Perl, shell scripts in some gawd-awful Ultrix shell CSH script, and C code full of weird -isms that made it difficult to port to anything made after the rise of mammals. This was of course mission critical. At least they virtualized it instead of continuing to run physical Ultrix boxes, which was apparently a huge fight with management.

A side dish of LULZ was that they were experimenting with moving the VMs to EC2, so there is probably Ultrix in EC2 now.

This stuff is really, really common in large "mature" industries and government.

What fight? The way those battles are waged in large, slow companies is that the political decisions are made over your head, without your input, and decided before you're made aware of them. It's a lot harder to try and fight a decision when the decision-makers don't know or care what you have to say.

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