Slight tangent, but I'll just comment that the business world runs on generally bad software – if they even have "software" and don't just use insanely complex

Slight tangent, but I'll just comment that the business world runs on generally bad software – if they even have "software" and don't just use insanely complex spreadsheets. It's one of those surprising things I've learned doing consulting for the last decade+. At first, I thought it was just the clients I happened to have, but given enough data points, a pattern emerged. Most software is bad, especially at places that don't consider themselves software companies, e.g., they don't sell a software service/product, they just use software for efficiency. I don't mean this as a judgement of the developers who wrote it. I've written plenty of software that looks bad in retrospect, from the outside. When you have the context of how decisions were made in the past, more often than not, you find a lot of small decisions that were reasonable in isolation but added together equal a big ball of mess where technical debt was rarely/never paid down, refactoring rarely/never took place, etc. It's not that hard to convince non-technical business folks of the value of paying down technical debt, but I've found it is hard to convince them to prioritize it. It always gets planned for the future, after whatever super-urgent CEO-driven initiative is currently happening, which is quickly followed by another and another. So yeah, I can imagine what the codebase looks like but not because of outsourced developers. You could just as easily say, "150 year old company depended entirely on overworked internal developers (you can imagine what the codebase looks like)."