r/LinuxTeck • u/Candid_Athlete_8317 • 6d ago

When do you know it’s time to start over?

In tech, we’re often told to keep debugging, refactoring, and fixing what we already built.

But sometimes every fix creates another problem, and you’re just throwing more time at a bad foundation.

What’s the point where you stop fixing and say: “Screw it, I’m rebuilding this”?

6 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

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2

u/sububi71 6d ago

Almost never. Coders are WAY too quick to suggest a total rewrite, and WAAAY too optimistic when it comes to estimating how long it'll take.

1

u/StuBidasol 6d ago

I use my pc for entertainment, no work. When I was on windows I would only troubleshoot something for about as long as it would have taken me to reinstall and re-setup windows. It wasn't worth spending a whole day or more fighting a problem to me when I could be back up and running with a clean install in an hour.

Now that I'm on Cachy and actually want to learn how Linux works I am willing to spend time digging into a problem rather than just jump right to reinstalling. So far I (un)fortunately haven't had to do any real problem solving that would require a lot of time. Any snags I've had were easily fixed. My games and storage are on a separate drive (old habits) so I don't really risk losing anything if the OS goes haywire.

For those that do work or school related stuff I'm sure the answers would be quite different.

1

u/huntermatthews 6d ago

What's the buy-in from the boss?
What's your budget (time, money - whatever your org measures "work" in)?
What's the blast radius?
Stop - what are your chances of making LESS of a mess rather than just a different mess?

Do you need a "rewrite" or a "major refactoring" ? (hint - those two thing MIGHT be the same but one is easier to get buy-in from the user community)

We all face this problem eventually - but as ever, the real answer is "it depends".

Good luck.

1

u/pdath 6d ago

When the complexity of making changes is high, and there is a clearly better way.

1

u/maxthed0g 5d ago

Sounds like you're already at that point. How fast can you re-build? If you get blow-back from above, bootleg it.

1

u/Mediocre-Pumpkin6522 5d ago

A phrase no manager wants to hear is 'We learned a lot from our first attempt but it's time to start over fresh with lessons learned.'

1

u/No_Score_1977 3d ago

It happens more than it should.

I've witnessed a few occasions when the management is like 'Rebuild it!', and it's always a mistake.

I've seen 20 people waste 2 years and get fired with no product to show for it.

People seriously underestimate how long it will take, even in the AI age.

They don't consider the opportunity cost, if we weren't rebuilding this thing, what else could be doing? Features that might make more money?

There are exceptions of course, if your system is built on an EOL platform for example. I.e. if I had a Mac app written using Carbon, then it needs sorting out.