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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

I honestly think that's pretty close to optimal for a lot of places. With business software it's often not desirable to have large sweeping changes. You may need some small change to a rule or condition, but usually you want things to stay exactly the way they are.

The model of having a circle of ancient greybeards in charge of carefully updating the sacred code to align with the business requirements, while it seems bizarre bordering on something out of WH40K, actually works pretty well and has worked pretty well everywhere I've encountered it.

Attempts to refactor or replace these systems with something more modern has universally been an expensive disaster.

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It does work for awhile, until one day:

Project Manager: "Can we ship an order to multiple addresses?"

Grey Beard: "No. We'd have to change thousands of random if-statements spread throughout the code."

Project Manager: "How long do you think that would take?"

Grey Beard: "2 years or more."

Project Manager: "Okay, we will break you down--err, I mean, we'll need to break the task down. I'll schedule long meetings until you relent and commit to a shorter time estimate."

Grey Beard eventually relents and gives a shorter time estimate for the project, and then leaves the company for another job that pays more half-way through the project.

Oh but the greybeards love meetings. There's nothing they'd rather do than spend days and weeks discussing how to affect changes, drawing boxes, writing documents, sending emails.

If Grey Beard doesn't relent

Project Manager: "Can we ship an order to multiple addresses? We need it in 2 weeks and Grey Beard didn't want to do it"

Eager Beaver: "Sure"

  if (order && items.length > 1 && ...) {  
    try {  
      const shipmentInformation = callNewModule(order, items, ...)  
      return shipmentInformation  
    } catch (err) {  
      // don't fail don't know if error is handled elsewhere  
      logger.error(err)  
    }  
  } else {  
    // old code by Grey Beard  
  }

... and then that `callNewModule` has weird bugs like mysteriously replacing `+` with spaces, sometimes labels are empty but only if they are shipped to a specific company, sometimes the invoices are generated multiple times for the same shipment, after 1 year after Sales has already sold this multi-item shipment feature to massive companies it suddenly stops working because the new module wasn't properly hooked for auto-renewing credentials with a specific service and the backlog of unshipped items but marked as shipped grows by the second...

Of course Eager Beaver didn't learn from this experience because they left the company a few months ago thinking their code was AWESOME and bragging about this one nicely scalable service they made for shipping to multiple addesses.

Meanwhile Grey Beard is the one putting out the fires, knowing that any attempt to tell Project Manager "finding and preventing situations like this was the reason why I told my estimate back then" would only be received with skepticism.

Of course, why reuse existing logic when we can (vibe) code new modules and functions from scratch every time we need it!

And eventually it took 3 years.

Some say they are still trying to get the original functionality back to this day.

> It does work for awhile, until one day:

Your counter example assumes the people managing the code base are incompetent.

Wouldn't the rewrite fail for the exact same reason if the company only employs incompetent tech people?

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