&gt;You don&#x27;t have to prove that COBOL-based system XYZ won&#x27;t blow up in your face or that frames-in-frames webpage mycompany.com&#x2F;abc won&#x27;t eventually look unprofessional and affect the company&#x27;s brand.<p>You can&#x27;t tell someone they&#x27;re doing it wrong if what they&#x27;re doing is making them money. That is the bottom line.<p>If my car is running fine, a mechanic telling me about my messed up gear alignment and replacing the clutch pressure plate thats &#x27;about to die&#x27; isn&#x27;t going to convince me to spend $3543 in parts and labor. That is what it sounds like to non-CS people.<p>You can educate yourself about one aspect of car, but unless you&#x27;re actually a mechanic yourself its trivial for an expert in a field to bilk someone outside of that field.<p>As a developer, it would be super easy for me to make-up technical debt, talk about API complexity, brittle design and what not, but ultimately no manager is just going to allow a developer to go about changing the design for no perceived gain (to them). This is not necessarily a bad thing, as the vast majority of developers, are simply mediocre and are poor judges of what constitutes good design anyway.