This might be true sometimes, but it hardly addresses the real problem: WHY are (some) devs like that? From experience I'd say that there are at least three (u

This might be true sometimes, but it hardly addresses the real problem: WHY are (some) devs like that? From experience I'd say that there are at least three (usually overlapping) reasons: - There are often valid technical reasons to rewrite at least parts of the codebase. Most companies tend towards a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" policy, which tends to lead to most components being in a "not far from broken due to poor maintenance" state. It is reasonable to want to fix those up before they cause an outage. An ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure and all that. - Making new things is more "fun" in one way or another, even if it is just because trying to grok the spaghetti code of another is "not fun". - The dev in question has (usually correctly) identified that the way to get more of what they want, be it money or power or fun colleagues or interesting projects, is to be involved in building new things. It's no secret that humans often ascribe more value to those who make new things even if it's not justified. Unless the environment becomes such that these three get mitigated, devs will always want to rewrite things as they are heavily incentivized to do so.