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> Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Comprehend your own business processes and rewrite legacy code?

> Comprehend your own business processes and rewrite legacy code?

I think the parent’s point is that sometimes this is prohobitively expensive or there is simply noone knowlegeable enough to do it. In those cases, rewriting is NOT what you gotta do.

Nah, that's poor decisionmaking. That macro probably has a bunch of bugs in it and has been giving wrong results for years, but they'd rather cargo-cult something where they don't understand the bugs than risk having bugs that they do understand. Watch for them to be the next Post Office/Fujitsu in 10 or 20 years' time when someone finally pulls on the thread of some issues they're seeing.

Believe me, it was tried multiple times to understand it -> rewrite it. The code was incomprehensible, the new business analysts didn't seem to know exactly what it was doing.

By the time I left, the spreadsheet was still relied on heavily.

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