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Comment by hilariously | Hacker News Reader

That's because the businesses got into the habit of new C level means new project, obviously the old code is bad.

I even had a PE buy the company I worked at, put in a new CEO, and his goal was to rewrite the entire code base in a year. I asked him what problems this would solve and never got a straight answer besides "its yucky" and "people told me they dont like it."

I have had multiple upper management teams decide that "dealing with this product is too hard, let's start from scratch" as if the new thing wouldn't have the same problems of the old thing, but with less effort put into it.

People love to work on new, all the possibilities and none of the bugs!(yet)

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Yep, I worked at a small company that got bought by a bigger one. We had a solid if aging product to support which was one of the big players for the niche. Once there was a leadership change, 2/3 of the devs got put on building a replacement software. Then in a couple of years our subgroup got spun off and sold to PE and the v2 project was shelved for another brand new design to align with the new ownership. I left just before the spin-off, but witnessed how the original software slowly rotted away and all of the marketshare dominance we had for that area slipped away.

Devs love new tech and the product people love something new to put their stamp on, but chasing that high can be ruinous.

I think that’s actually the product incentive structure inside Google iirc

I think that’s right

I have seen over the past decades this concept of just reusable throw it away code becomes the norm and that’s why also I’m always surprised to look at people complaining about AI development and it’s like yeah it’s just the same as all other development at this point everything‘s just frameworks and throwaway code

I’m not even mad at it but it’s just one of those things where people are like “I’ve never dealt with anything like this”

But it’s the majority of operational software engineering since more or less forever

I think its also the pyramid of age - as you work in this field a lot of people burn out, the field was significantly smaller in the past and has shown huge growth, and the young say "yes sir!" and work nights and weekends on the fucking stupid idea while the older folks push back.

So in general most of the people have worked on a bunch of greenfield development, thought of the project 2 years old as aged out entirely, and never thought you might "maintain" something at all.

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