Honestly, we can't really blame the developers either. If you inherit a compilation of different techniques, there isn't much you could do to it. There isn't ne

Honestly, we can't really blame the developers either. If you inherit a compilation of different techniques, there isn't much you could do to it. There isn't necessarily a code base that you could build on as the same thing is already been done in a number of different ways. So any way you're going to make changes there isn't going to make the code much better and, thus, the least worst choice would be to start gradually injecting some consistency into the codebase even if that's the fifth layer on top of the previous ones. Maybe, just possibly, the second developer could at least theoretically continue exactly from where the first developer left off (a single person or team == a single codebase that's at least somewhat consistent) but it could often make the mess even worse if the first developer really didn't have much of a clue of what he was doing. The managers are basically the customer who ordered the software and they can't be trusted to know anything. It's a very common case that the customer doesn't know what they need and it's the job of the developers to first figure out the customer's real problem before beginning prototyping.