[acdha]

Remember Conway's law and look for the factors which lead to unmaintainable code: poor communications, inconsistent or conflicting management positions, unrealistic and unreliable deadlines, poor internal environments and processes, hiring and review processes which do not reward the right things, trusting consultants rather than staff, etc.

Nobody says they want to waste money building bad software. The problem is that the factors which ensure it are political and hard to change. It's easy to forget that since we tend to focus on the visible technical aspects but they're almost always a reflection of the environment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law