Thank you for your follow up. Clearly your experience is far outside my world. I've never heard of an outside consultant being brought in to second guess the company's "architect".
It seems like you mostly move among bad developers. I don't think your experience is relevant to most of the developers reading HN.
Obviously, a full rewrite not a good idea in most cases as Spolsky eloquently argued.
PS: I didn't detect any "defensiveness" (you know, the catchall passive-aggressive term that is used to use to imply that the other side has a weak hand without backing it up) in the post you were responding to. It rang true to me.
It seems like you mostly move among bad developers. I don't think your experience is relevant to most of the developers reading HN.
Obviously, a full rewrite not a good idea in most cases as Spolsky eloquently argued.
PS: I didn't detect any "defensiveness" (you know, the catchall passive-aggressive term that is used to use to imply that the other side has a weak hand without backing it up) in the post you were responding to. It rang true to me.