In the last several years, I was at two companies that got rid of all their previous code, and did radical re-writes of everything This is almost always the wr

In the last several years, I was at two companies that got rid of all their previous code, and did radical re-writes of everything This is almost always the wrong thing to do, mind, especially if you're fresh to the situation and don't know the full product functionality. It can pay off, but it usually doesn't; and when it does, the results are often mixed - things might be neater, faster, more maintainable etc., but usually they're less featureful or buggy in some other dimension.