A problem that is endemic to the whole developer community is the urge to "rewrite everything". It is the one of the most harmful practices in software engineering.
Why? (thread)
Why? (thread)
Most software in production out there is complex. Some are spaghetti code nightmares, but I believe most are somewhat decently built. Sometimes developers joining a project confuse a "complex" codebase with a "spaghetti" codebase, and they feel like throwing it away.
The feeling of throwing it away comes from the fact that they don't fully understand it, and that if it's built with tools that aren't their favorite, they feel less productive in it.
The big mistake is to assume that with the "right tools" they can rebuild the whole thing in a short amount of time.
The trap is that they are optimizing for *speed* (productivity in getting things done), while they should optimize for *distance* (amount of use cases covered).
The trap is that they are optimizing for *speed* (productivity in getting things done), while they should optimize for *distance* (amount of use cases covered).
A complex codebase in production has covered a lot of *distance*, measured in how many important corner cases it covers when serving end-users. Developers underestimate the importance of this distance A LOT.
You can run faster with your own tools, but do you know how long it will take to catch up? Also, do you know the direction to take (the "map" of all corner cases to address) or are you going to end up in a different state when you're done (causing breaking changes to end users)?
It's not all the devs fault though, managers often don't understand the nature of code, and when bringing a new developer into the team, they expect them to be productive in fixing bug and making features from day one.
Instead, new developers should be given time to simply *understand* the codebase and digest all of its complexity. You don't need to build it yourself in order to understand it, you can also just study it. Give it like 2 weeks at least. That's something managers should give devs.
If a rewrite is truly required, then do it gradually and do it in production. Don't downplay complexity that is inherent to the software's use cases.
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