This seems like a great post to vent a little bit. I'm definitely a bit touchy on this subject.

I like to think I'm pretty good at programming, development, and generally architecting solutions. I don't have a lot of experience, but I have a bit of talent and spent a lot of free time learning. Solving problems with computers is something I'm passionate about.

I started this particular project without any idea of what it was (okay, they told me what it was, but it turned out to be something completely different). When we did a kickoff it was myself, two other developers (who both said during the kickoff they didn't want to be on this team, and wanted to go back to admin'ing MSSQL databases), and a non-technical TPM (last time he touched a terminal was a decade ago, and he wasn't particularly interested even back then).

I ended up doing pretty much all the work. My PM would CC me on emails, I'd write the stories, he'd help prioritize them, and I'd do them. The first few weeks they wanted three services stood up and managed in an automated fashion. I got it done, it wasn't pretty. Hell I hadn't even figured out a DNS scheme, but this had to get done so other teams would be unblocked; it was the development account so I wasn't too worried about rushed work.

Then we got more requests from other teams, and vague requirements from the infosec and governance teams. Then the board that reviews new technologies shot down our (my) requests to introduce automation services like Ansible Tower. Then the AWS team shot down our request for multiple accounts, one per environment.

At this point the Cloudformation isn't scaling, I beg and plead for some time to freeze feature development and move to Terraform. I asked for 3-4 weeks, and was given 4 days. This was the one chance to move to Terraform though, otherwise we'd be using Cloudformation for the foreseeable future. So I took it, deciding I could rush through the Terraform rewrite, because then at least we could refactor it later during downtime.

Next thing you know a year has gone by and we're going into production. Everything on the devops end goes pretty smoothly. My velocity is crap though, due in large part because of the shitty rushed work, which it seemed was all I was capable of.

A few months after go-live, we finally get a real TPM, which was a godsend. I was moving to another team at this point, and so his first order of business was to replace me with two new guys. I spent a lot of nights interviewing and a month afterwards helping them get up to speed. I and the new TPM gave them cover that month so they could embark on rewriting the Terraform.

They ignored my suggestions on how to refactor it, which is okay, I was leaving the team, it was their code as now. But it was hard, hearing them laugh at the code behind my back, saying how bad it was. Never giving me a chance to justify it, or even reading the commit messages, to understand why it was done that way.

I'm off the team now, and while I recognize I left a lot of legacy code behind (which I'm not proud of), it wasn't just me who created it. It was also the business who said time and again development speed was the most important thing.

That's how one legacy codebase was created. There were a lot of things I might have been able to do differently (mostly politically), but I truly believe I did the best I could with what I had. But what do I know? My new TPM seemed to agree with me, but maybe he just didn't want to make an enemy. Perhaps I could have headed it off if I'd said the right words to the right people. I don't know, will never know.

This experience is why I don't make fun of others solutions. Somebody put effort and time and thought into it, and I guarantee (in most cases) I don't have that context to properly evaluate it.