RethinkDigg.com

Yep often all the accrued "bug fixes" accumulated in the complicated solution are "fixes" for "bugs" like "Jim didn't know that the language standard library already had a solution for this, so he made it himself, poorly" or "Pam,Bob,and Dave each had to come back and fix Jim's naive solution by coding specific logic for the corner case they each ran into".

When the new hire Steve shows up and deletes the whole thing and uses the time-tested model of the wheel, he is not a villain, and anything to suggest otherwise is poor management philosophy that will drive Steves away, leaving you with a bad project, bad management and bad engineers (AKA 99% of every project ever). Even if by doing so Steve introduces bugs in the two-wrongs-make-a-right consuming code (which is simply a bug) and isn't polite enough to discover this on his own. The flexibility and resources to make systematic improvements like these which combat cruft and maintain or repair feature velocity are why QA - automated or otherwise - exists.

Honestly though, I don't think the article really means to cover such a scenario. There are many times that engineers decide to replace rather than understand a system which is complex-for-a-reason, this is written specifically with that in mind.

I regularly see this as I use/develop against/contribute to Drupal - a marvelously complex-for-a-reason(usually) piece of engineering that happens to be written in PHP - a language with a community that still celebrates simplicity-at-whatever-cost. "Nevermind that the theme/cache/localization/form/whathaveyou system accounts for what I need, it's more than what I need and I don't trust code more complex than I (or any single person with a single use case for that matter) could have written."

He doesn't make that clear, but it's the only sense I can make of the article given his degree of experience.

I believe that market is already well covered (https://www.4chan.org/).

If they do a search function that is exactly the opposite of Reddit, then I will go back to Digg.

It only feels that way if you never bothered to change the subreddits you're subscribed to by default. /funny, /wtf, /videos, /politics are obviously overrun with teens and immaturity. Once you unsubscribe from those and subscribe to smaller, more intellectually focused subreddits, you'll find the 'old reddit'.

The project I'm working on now is at a point where it's either spend a HUGE amount of time refactoring and fixing everything or just start over. We can't just continue adding on features with the state the code is in.

The question is, which will be faster?

Right now, it's written to run on an old OS, with old versions of old languages. We absolutely HAVE to update this stuff as it's just stupid to continue programming in the dark ages (no code completion, no jump to definition, printf debugging).

But is it better to refactor the code and rewrite it slowly, or just scrap it, lose all of the old terrible design decisions, and move on.

You ask the question "Why do you think you'd make the design decisions correctly this time around?" Well, we didn't write the first version. It was given to a vendor that totally botched the job and it's our responsibility to fix it.