I spent a good fraction of my career taking over and trying to fix code bases that my company refused to scrap and replace outright because they didn’t want to admit their worthlessness. Complete rewrites would have taken maybe a tenth of the time I spent.

My favorite thing to encounter (which was nearly universal) was the phenomenon of a young programmer fresh out of college encountering SQL for the first time, deciding he hated it, and writing a huge mess of code to handle auto-generating the necessary SQL. I remember taking over one C# application that had classes named “AND.cs” and “OR.cs” which just took a String as a parameter and returned that String with " AND " and " OR " appended to it, respectively. In about an hour, I replaced three months of this guy’s work that had bottlenecked the project with like five SQL statements.

It’s insane to think what the civil engineering world would be like if it had the career structure of the software world.