management is clueless. they think the people that write huge routines with great embedded complexity are the good programmers but the programmers that write small simple routines that can easily be maintained are a dime a dozen.
Maintenance is 80% of the cost of software systems. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at code and said screw this, I am rewriting the entire thing. I would run my code thru a complexity analyzer and rarely got over 20, I’d run code written by the other “top guns” in the company and seldom saw less than 80 sometimes over 200! over 100 was consider unmaintainable due to code complexity. I would beg to be allowed into that code (almost 1 million lines of jdbc) so I could re engineer it. Of course that never happened so I did it on my own time using plain old java objects and hibernate, took me almost two years, I did it just to prove it could be done. I swapped out the entire database layer in a huge enterprise document management system and demo it to management. 1 million lines of complex code to under 100,000 lines of simple code. They were unimpressed. Of course my code had “issues” and did not do all the jdbc code did but the issues could be resolved. A little while later I got canned and software sent to India for maintenance and development. lol, I still have my version running on my computers. Might open source it one of these days.