The Importance of Understanding Your Code Base

Some legacy software might have been written by people years ago that really nobody really knows anymore. If you don't read the code, if you don't understand the code, what are you rewriting? Right. You can't just ignore the previous two decades of learning and say, we're just going to start from scratch from a position of ignorance. Now the company's really going to have to go through 20 years of pain again to try to figure out all the things that you missed in your clean room, rewrite.