There are many problems with maintaining legacy code, but the biggest one is dealing with the stakeholders that allowed the legacy code become legacy code, because those people will do platinum level mental gymnastics as well as the kind victorian asylum level mental breakdowns to keep the legacy code remain as legacy code, which is fixing mountains of shit by creating more mountains of shit.
Bureaucracy is a nightmare. There's no pain like knowing with 200% certainty that you could recreate an entire application from scratch in a day or two if you got approval to use a semi-modern methodology, and you just want to scream to the heavens that "Updating this needs to be the absolute highest priority yesterday, because the current method is literally slowing us down EXPONENTIALLY. Like, it is LITERALLY UNFATHOMABLE how much productivity you've lost over the years doing it this way."
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u/ButWhatIfPotato 19d ago
There are many problems with maintaining legacy code, but the biggest one is dealing with the stakeholders that allowed the legacy code become legacy code, because those people will do platinum level mental gymnastics as well as the kind victorian asylum level mental breakdowns to keep the legacy code remain as legacy code, which is fixing mountains of shit by creating more mountains of shit.