[specialist]

+1

Word of support: Some people call this "technical debt".

At my current day gig, developing new "products", I spend a lot of time trying to understand what's what. Oversimplifying: dealing with terrible legacy code, overwraught design, poor implementations of poorly defined interfaces, supporting byzantine processes.

We have acres of documentation. Mostly out of date, useless, or both. We make up for the lack of clarity by having lots and lots of meetings, where we get to swap misunderstandings.

I experience recurring eurekas, each time I finally understand the actual end goal (business need, user's use case). Quickly followed by a face palm slap, wondering why anyone would make such a simple problem so frikkin hard.

[mojuba]

Often it's not just algorithms and approaches, but also the choice of tools. I once had a rare opportunity to rewrite a legacy application from scratch, and by simply switching from COM/DCOM to REST I got code base 20 times smaller than the original. 20 friggin' times!