[anton_gogolev]

Good ol' accidental complexity and essential complexity.

There's a nontrivial amount of technologies that are complex and otherwise byzantine for no reason. Given the lack of alternatives, knowing the arcane tech inside and out can provide for a sustained stream of money, but that's hardly ethical.

[PaulHoule]

It's not always "no reason."

Back the 1990s, GNU autoconf looked like a miracle to me, and in fact, back then you got better results compiling from source than you got using what passed for a package manager.

These days people complain that autoconf is too complicated, being a bunch of shell scripts on top of shell scripts compiled with M4.

Then there is SAP, which stands alone in its ability to destroy value. SAP started out as a mainframe application, got ported to Unix in the 1990s (not many succeeded at that) and now they want you to run it on an in memory database for which you can't afford the hardware, never mind the software.

[nickpsecurity]

SAP is the perfect example to support learning hard tech for dollars. So many people get paid a premium to work on that stuff because nobody can get rid of it without risky moves.

[nottednelson]

To me the more interesting point is the high risk. Given that someone is using a needlessly complex technology, and given that they can't maintain it themselves, they actually do need someone who can handle the needlessly complex technology. So unless you're brownfielding, the practice isn't unethical. But it can still be high risk -- mainly, I guess, because of the high opportunity cost of coupling your expertise to suboptimal tech.