I'm not following. > [bad developer burns a year worth of salary building something that doesn't work] The cost you cite for the rewrite implies a week or two

I'm not following. > [bad developer burns a year worth of salary building something that doesn't work] The cost you cite for the rewrite implies a week or two worth of work. Why did this developer spend an entire year on it? Really bad developers are really bad, yes. Double work is very expensive. > I didn’t rewrite it because of its poor performance > ... massive performance improvement, and it’ll be even better once I finish building the cashing. So even with the massive performance improvement, you still need to improve the performance even more? It sounds like you would of had to rewrite parts of the system even if it was decently written to begin with.