"Or that the site makes a few hundred million dollars, and can't just be rewritten on a whim?" Why not? If the site is unstable and can't stay up, you can eith

"Or that the site makes a few hundred million dollars, and can't just be rewritten on a whim?" Why not? If the site is unstable and can't stay up, you can either throw 50 programmers at it and still have it crash regularly or you can take far fewer and re-write it from scratch. You're right about programmers not liking the cruft, but we also don't like most of the management processes that occur in large companies. I don't know if things have changed, but back when I worked for a large brake corporation, web programmers were devalued and distrusted. All of our decisions had to be signed off (in triplicate!) by a manager who didn't know how to program or the implications of the decisions being made. To give you on example, one of the official company-wide policies was that if you wanted to transfer files between company offices over the internet, you had to use FTP for "security purposes." We were technically not allowed to use SSH or SFTP because, when I asked, my boss said nobody had heard of it. This was in 2006.