Yeah, I agree. It&#x27;s a really common excuse and I think it somewhat diminishes the credibility of those who use it. I don&#x27;t think anyone&#x27;s opinion on what constitutes a &quot;truly horrible codebase&quot; should count until they&#x27;ve been a developer for at least 10 years, worked at several different employers, and contributed to several different large open-source projects (which usually have the luxury of rejecting code until they feel it&#x27;s &quot;right&quot; despite the potential commercial consequences, not something that most other projects get to do). &quot;This codebase is terrible&quot; is a common whine from newer devs and&#x2F;or people that are just too lazy to put in the time to learn someone else&#x27;s code.<p>In the real world, production projects get messy because getting stuff done is more important than building a codebase that represents the paragon of academic excellence. That doesn&#x27;t automatically make the project horrible.