I recently “inherited” a couple of back-end services when a developer left our company

The points he lays out at the beginning of his post are basically Martin Fowler's (and thus 90% of enterprise engineers') position in Refactoring . Fowler was probably responding to engineers making code inscrutable in the name of (dubious claims of) performance, and Muratori here is responding to the ensuing overreaction.

> I’m not sure people are saying that it doesn’t In my career I've meet people who genuinely don't care about performance. For them code either works or doesn't. Back in the days when everyone used bare hardware if a developer would push a change which suddenly requires 10x more hardware (or makes 10x more requests to other's team service) it would break the system and force to do something about it - either order more hardware (takes time) or fix the software (usually faster). Nowadays cloud would auto-scale and such change would go unnoticed, the only difference will be the next month's cloud bill.

I'm not following. > [bad developer burns a year worth of salary building something that doesn't work] The cost you cite for the rewrite implies a week or two worth of work. Why did this developer spend an entire year on it? Really bad developers are really bad, yes. Double work is very expensive. > I didn’t rewrite it because of its poor performance > ... massive performance improvement, and it’ll be even better once I finish building the cashing. So even with the massive performance improvement, you still need to improve the performance even more? It sounds like you would of had to rewrite parts of the system even if it was decently written to begin with.