I'm willing to bet that if the everything were clear and easy to modify, they'd prefer not rewriting everything. If it "just worked," they could focus on adding customer-pleasing, revenue-increasing functionality, a far more reliable path to promotion.
First everyone knows monoliths are bad. Next understanding existing code is hard work, writing your own new code is perfectly understandable and fun, because you’re the one who wrote it, and you write perfect code! It’s so good you don’t even need to comment it!
The default thought process is 1. I don’t understand this code and business domain, 2. It is too complex, 3. We should rewrite it as microservices 4. You’ve replace 2% of the system with your microservice, 5. New devs quit because your own service is now too much hassle to maintain, 6. Old devs quit because you wasted enough of their time 7. The org now has n+1 layers of tech debt, ready for the cycle to repeat.
When I left n=5. 4 had a good run and we really tried to keep it going. Can’t fight the HN zerg sometimes.
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Why do they really want to rewrite everything?
I'm willing to bet that if the everything were clear and easy to modify, they'd prefer not rewriting everything. If it "just worked," they could focus on adding customer-pleasing, revenue-increasing functionality, a far more reliable path to promotion.
First everyone knows monoliths are bad. Next understanding existing code is hard work, writing your own new code is perfectly understandable and fun, because you’re the one who wrote it, and you write perfect code! It’s so good you don’t even need to comment it!
The default thought process is 1. I don’t understand this code and business domain, 2. It is too complex, 3. We should rewrite it as microservices 4. You’ve replace 2% of the system with your microservice, 5. New devs quit because your own service is now too much hassle to maintain, 6. Old devs quit because you wasted enough of their time 7. The org now has n+1 layers of tech debt, ready for the cycle to repeat.
When I left n=5. 4 had a good run and we really tried to keep it going. Can’t fight the HN zerg sometimes.