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Is this a 0 interest rate phenomenon? Historically, old software hung around. And the new greenfield stuff had a high bar to clear to replace what currently worked. The momentum around something already in prod is pretty high, and big rewrites are hard, whereas incremental refactors are easier. The last 5-10 years seems to buck this trend: you got promoted by claiming credit for some new service that does the same thing as a legacy thing (maybe even less, lol) but in Rust, or some new fangled framework. Sometimes this happens because truly, first principles, its the right choice. Other times, it can be dubious, but enough people have convinced themselves that staff is needed to do this. And directors and tech leads will get a promotion when its done. Lately, I think there's a lot of frugality in tech: do we _really_ need to rewrite FooService? Do we really need to migrate to NewFangledThingX? I think and hope there will be a renaissance in boring tech, and rewrites of something will be cautious and only done when first principles the old thing can't solve the problem anymore. BTW, I've been in this field long enough to know we're all tech debt in the end ;). It's the nature of the beast that old things get rediscovered, and spun new ways. Don't get too curmudgeonly, nothing is ever truly original, but there are evolutions on ideas. And many fundamental skills stay the same: software engineering, testing, performance, team building, reliability, etc, will last a long time |