Stop Blaming Legacy Code — It’s Probably Smarter Than You Think

What that “terrible” 15-year-old codebase taught me about software engineering

I spent my first month at my current job writing a document titled “The Case for a Complete Rewrite.” The codebase was a disaster — or so I thought. Fifteen-year-old PHP with global variables everywhere, inconsistent naming conventions, and comments in three different languages. I was going to save this company from itself.

My manager read the document, smiled, and said: “Before we do that, can you fix the bug in the checkout flow?”

That bug took me two weeks to fix. Not because the code was bad, but because I didn’t understand it. More importantly, I didn’t understand the problem it was solving.

Three years later, I’m still working with that “terrible” codebase. And I’ve learned more from it than from any computer science course I ever took.

The Arrogance of the Modern Developer

We have a problem in this industry. We see old code and assume it’s bad. We see patterns we don’t recognize and assume they’re wrong. We see complexity and assume it’s unnecessary.