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It's strange that this is so prevalent in the industry. Who ever got promoted for fixing all the hard bugs? Reinventing the wheel is the safe career move in many companies. And the result are huge R&D budgets, bugs and a bad user experience.

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To be fair, a rewrite from scratch can be justified in many situations, e.g. out of support stack that is hard to hire for or a change of direction where a lot of bespoke code was written and now a one size fits all is used, thus leaving a lot of redundant and interlinked code.

Rarely are those potential reasons actually weighted up against the full cost of the rewrite

But for it to work well the rewrite should be done by someone that understands the current system, not as a way to avoid understanding the current system.

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