This is a tough spot to be in. From the perspective of a tech lead / individual contributor (I don't consider myself in the company of a Fellow or C-level exec), I've witnessed this kind of situation before and learned a few lessons from it, which I'd like to share here. (Bear in mind, I use the phrase "lessons learned" here loosely, as I could have drawn incorrect conclusions from my experiences, so please pay more attention to the explanations of the points more than the takeaways.)
- Don't bite off more than you can chew. You could "replatform" and try to replace everything that currently works with new tech. In my experience, while the result is an admirable amount of sophisticated technology, the value for the business is unrealizable for a significant amount of time (which usually results in "bad things," like your stock going down, employees being unhappy/leaving due to thinking that it's not going to work out, sales not hitting targets because they don't believe in the product they're selling, customers having more "strength" during contract/sales negotiations, etc). I have observed ~4 years of significant (maybe over a hundred engineers) investment in an effort to replace the entire technology of a relatively young company. I have read many stories of companies doing this and going belly-up as what appears to be a direct result (few companies survive the process; Uber would be an example of a company that is doing this and will survive[1] -- Steve Blank has some particularly appropriate reading material[2]). The problem is the business must continue to grow and sell its product during this time (stable business is important, but growth is critical -- and you can't focus on growth when you're rewriting your technology from the ground up). This seems obvious, but the moment I hear someone say "greenfield" when they also have significant tech debt, I raise an eyebrow of suspicion.
- So, following that, do bite off very small chunks and slowly decompose your tech debt into whatever your well-paid, highly-competent team lead(s) recommend in terms of architecture. For example, if you have a huge legacy application, slowly separate each logical component into its own microservice (assuming your team leads believe microservices are the best architecture for your use-case, etc).
- Freelancers/students/interns/contractors are great! But don't let them design anything. I say this not as a jab to anyone in this category. I work with people in these categories daily. However, it's critical that their work is only implementation and that it is written in a way that has absolute minimal cognitive overhead. The reason is because if you hire someone temporarily to produce a hoozit that does Thing, then in the absolute best case, they will produce exactly that, but you (and your well-paid, highly-competent staff) will have absolutely no idea or understanding as to how or why the hoozit does Thing, or how to modify the hoozit to be a whatsit, or make the hoozit do Otherthing. Sure, you could figure it out. But I posit the cost of doing so is greater than the cost of having done it yourself, even if it takes longer. And now that I think of it, this point is supported strongly by your very own experience already: temp workers always produce technical debt, even in the absolute best case (an example of a worse case is that they produce an unmaintainable/incomprehensible/unmodifiable hoozit that does not do Thing or only does Thing in some conditions a.k.a. being riddled with bugs). Competency or compensation has little or no effect. My belief is that this is often because temp workers know their position is temporary and will strive to achieve exactly Thing when building your hoozit -- they are economically motivated to do so. They are not economically motivated to build your hoozit in such a way that it can become a whatsit later on.
- Remember to deliver value -- in particular, drive growth. This is super important in the technology industry. You should always have some amount of your engineering muscle focused on delivering new value. Sometimes that is reducing technical debt, or decomposing your legacy application, or building new products. Sometimes it's integrating a third-party's product with yours in some way, as "uncool" as that may sound. Sometimes you are in a bind when you can't produce new value without dealing with technical debt. So deal with the technical debt in the most sensible way (i.e., not producing additional technical debt, but also not foregoing any work to reduce your technical debt in the pure interest of improving the top line). If you think of your legacy application as delivering some value, but you don't ever add new features to it, consider your competition and whether your business will lose critically due to lack of innovation.
- I believe that the best engineers care a lot more about understanding the business and how their work aligns with it. If you ask your team, I expect they will tell you that they would rather work on the mind-numbing effort, in some way, if it is the best thing for the business. Junior software developers will always prefer greenfield. More senior software developers will seek the optimal solution. (Similarly to how junior engineers will prefer Shiny New Tech X, whereas senior engineers will only use Shiny New Tech X when it really, really makes sense to do so and there is a strong alignment with the business and/or low risk to doing so -- like in a new product/microservice that is less critical than your core product offerings, for instance.)
- Don't fall into the trap of believing that the only way to grow the business is to abandon/migrate away from legacy applications. At the least, move your users/customers as you decompose/replace legacy software/services. Avoid trying to make big migrations, especially wholesale. (OK, maybe I'm repeating my first point here...)
Separately, I'm curious why the CEO having written any of the code matters if he is no longer contributing code (I'm assuming he is not, since you mentioned he stopped learning new techniques). Or did you mean that he stopped having free time to learn new techniques and therefore stopped contributing code? I would think the CEO needs to stop contributing code as soon as you have enough engineers to meet your minimum desired sprint points (or whatever metric you use for productivity). I certainly don't think that not having learned new techniques necessitates the cessation of contribution, although learning new techniques is a likely byproduct of contribution (due to experience, research, implementation itself, code reads, etc). But, I'm digressing from the topic.
Anyway, hopefully my commentary/experience is helpful to you. Best of luck!
[1] https://eng.uber.com/soa/
[2] https://steveblank.com/2011/01/25/startup-suicide-%E2%80%93-...