"There is no way to build something stable in these circumstances" Yes, there is. Since he clearly stated that started as a job assigned to his team, he could'

"There is no way to build something stable in these circumstances" Yes, there is. Since he clearly stated that started as a job assigned to his team, he could've version it right there where it was officially staying. Then it would've be very easy to see changes done to it by somebody else, even if who was that somebody else was unknown to him. "Then someone anonymous in some layer above you decides something else" He also stated in the article that he had a lot of time in his hands and tried a refactoring. You don't have time to do a refactoring of a file with 11k lines of code in only 2 weeks, so he clearly had at least several months. My conclusion still stands.