The desire to rewrite something is the single biggest red flag for me that someone has questionable technical decision making skills. Yes there can be good reasons for it, but my priors shift dramatically once I hear someone suggest it
I used to agree, but there’s so much software that is just so bad. Wrong DB, bad framework, crazy abstractions, black box magic, no security, behavior that is just wrong, etc.
The dev team going away for 3 months to rewrite is probably a bad idea, though. There are definitely good ways to rewrite and then not good ways.
I'll agree with you if you mean - entirely en masse. I specialize in fixing legacy software systems that have ground to a halt development-wise. Blanket rewrites are almost never a good thing, but partial rewrites are a wonderful tool. Like most things in this industry there unfortunately isn't a hard and fast rule. Everything is extremely context-dependent.
