The Engineers Who Built It Are Bad at Estimating a Rewrite (opens in new tab)

The simple version The engineers who built a system are too close to it to estimate rebuilding it accurately. Their knowledge becomes a liability, not an asset. The scenario that plays out everywhere A VP of Engineering calls a meeting. The old system is a mess. Customers are complaining about reliability, the codebase is five years of scar tissue, and every new feature takes three times longer than it should. She asks the team: how long to rewrite this properly? The lead engineer, who has li...