Very true. In many businesses their software systems are the only coherent and (mostly) consistent description of business processes. There may not be any docum

Very true. In many businesses their software systems are the only coherent and (mostly) consistent description of business processes. There may not be any documentation and often no single person in the company knows how everything works. Customers will tell you how they'd like things to work -- green fields projects give them a chance to dream and try to fix everything -- but whatever code they have tells you how things actually work. Ignore that at your peril. I don't care how 10X someone thinks they are. No one can walk into a business, have a one hour meeting glancing at some screens, click through some code ("Oh wow. Shitty. This is terrible.") and learn even a tiny bit of how things actually work. Yet I see proposals for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars based on that kind of shallow analysis, and a customer high on the promise of seeing their dreams realized in what will be the first perfect software development project in history. You're exactly right, "Anyone can start a new greenfield application. Working on a legacy codebase takes at least a bit of courage and a deep understanding of the business involved."