serving the engineer _does_ serve the business, ultimately.
A lot of rewrites could be avoided if people spent some time to actually understand what was done before. It’s a pretty safe assumption that the people who worked on the codebase before were as smart as you.
Amen! Code is never written in a vacuum. Code is never shaped only by engineering but by business and organizational compromises as well. I hate those guys who declare we absolutely must do sweeping changes to the codebase/architecture so that we are in line with the latest best practices after spending an hour with the codebase. As if the guys who spent the last 3+ years staring and building on said codebase didn't know any better (unless of course you were hired specifically because you ought to know better!).
They also don't understand that their super shiny code will be legacy soon too.
The motivations and goals back then could have been different, specially in the case of MVPs
it’s not always a safe assumption.
planned a full rewrite of a product at last company. i knew things were fucked 3 months in. i started really planning the rewrite 1.5 years in.
that year taught me just how fucked it was: bugs galore, race conditions, crashing frontend, testing in customer environments, data loss, rolled their own security (users from any group could login to any other instance).
previous big brained devs really fucked it and there wasn’t much of anything to show for it.
i fixed a bunch of it. but it still needed a rewrite because they had built the wrong thing. which was the bigger issue i realised 3 months in.
That said, it's probably more dependent on what a 'full' rewrite actually is - I would be much more reluctant for a full-stack rewrite, particularly of a mature codebase with a lot of accumulated business logic. At least on the front end you can always push to move business logic upstream where it belongs.
This essay sounds more like a second phase. Rewriting something that you do not understand makes sense if most people on team do not understand it well, and are supposed to actively contribute to it OR you are at an inflection point where the choice of architectural or foundational decisions made back then become a bottleneck in every day performance or feature development.
Business is looking it from the cost benefit perspective and they would not approve it at the cost of company time and money if it doesnt makes sense to them. Your ability to fool them for your motivations may be a different angle, still they are the ones making the call.