> Corollary 1. Who can, and sometimes does, un-rot the fish from the bottom? An insane employee. Someone who finds the forks, crashes, etc. a personal offense,

> Corollary 1. Who can, and sometimes does, un-rot the fish from the bottom? An insane employee. Someone who finds the forks, crashes, etc. a personal offense, and will repeatedly risk annoying management by fighting to stop these things. Especially someone who spends their own political capital, You're not alone. I am this person, but I also have the advantage of being management. In one case, I led a 9 month ninja effort refactor an entire spaghetti monolith in semi-opposition to my boss' (CEO) wishes. We did it very smartly, though, which was to have a plan in place that was to a) have a plan b) focus on observability in the final product and c) used "extreme campfire rules" to implement. First steps were hard, which was where we completely reorganized everything into logical services with defined APIs within the monolith. During the couple months, overall product velocity slowed, so we tread with care and hustled to get stuff out on time. After that point, the resulting code sanity increased velocity so we could focus on things like revamping logging to be massively more useful, better data migrations, consistent deploy process for developer machines, dev integration server, staging, and production servers, and implementation of automated service and integration testing. The net result of 9 months of work was shipping tons of new features, virtually eliminating any down time (from hours a month to minutes per year), and a net loss of about 20% of the codebase. It was a smashing success that I couldn't tell anyone else on the management team about. I did get the ultimate payoff a couple years later when we were acquired by a $30B company and received many kudos during the technical due diligence process for the state of our architecture and reliability.