In the article you wrote > As for solutions, there isn't much to say about the second system effect except you should do your utmost to prevent it; it's entire

In the article you wrote > As for solutions, there isn't much to say about the second system effect except you should do your utmost to prevent it; it's entirely self-imposed. Refactor your code instead. Even if it seems like incrementalism will be more work... it's worth it. That seems to be a misleading conclusion? Maybe the moral is rather that you will probably vastly underestimate the Big Rewrite. If it is still worth it at 10x the estimated effort, you should still do it though (WinNT, OSX, etc). That raises the question if we could improve about estimating such Big Rewrite tasks. Following that thought, the chicken-and-egg problems collapses into the second-system problem. You need to rewrite incrementally in small steps but it only pays off once you completed all the steps (or at least most of them). Until then you just introduced inconsistency into your codebase. You left a local optimum to go for another one and naturally it gets worse before it gets better. You better plan ahead how to keep moral and management support big enough to cross that gap.