[pluto9]

> Any company that wants to survive long-term doesn't do that. So go work for those instead. Companies who treat code this way aren't software companies, and they ain't gonna stick around for the long-run.

I wish this was true, but in my experience it's not. The company I currently work for has an old crufty codebase, large areas of which are not understood by anyone but the few remaining early hires. This codebase is going on 20 years old and is getting more complex with every release. And yet our revenue grows year after year because our competitors are far, far worse.

Another company I worked for years ago has by far the worst code and development practices I've ever seen. I'm talking about having the actual Visual Studio solution running live on the production server, and development was done by opening it in Visual Studio and hacking on it while it was running. I have never seen such towering incompetence before or since. I left partly because I was convinced the company would implode within a couple of years due to a developer accidentally nuking the production database or because the cost of developing new features would exceed any new revenue they could possibly bring in. Five years later, somehow they're still going strong.