[gregmac]

> Rewrites are very risky, time-consuming and make no money for the company.

It can also put you in an awkward position -- especially if the prior developer has a grudge against their code being rewritten -- as any bugs that come up can then be blamed on the rewrite effort, whether or not that was actually the cause.

Spaghetti code eventually collapses on its own, as every change starts taking longer and longer than expected, as well as introduces more and more bugs (and fixes for those introduce more, and so on). Once this starts happening, that can be the impetus to actually do a real rewrite effort, but one with a business case, management and hopefully the other developer(s) behind it.

Until then, a rewrite is a lot of effort that, at best, if you do a great job, is basically invisible (beyond the code level), and at worst either becomes a scapegoat for or the cause of many other problems.