It's tragicomical, since it's at the core of renowned institutions I thought surely this must be a world of logical, crisp perfection. A perfectly engineered engine, surely if these systems are so important and at the very center of what makes society work and all flow of money and whatever, geniuses must have perfected it all thrice-over. I wouldn't say reality was equal to 1/expectations^3 , but maybe 1/expectations^2. Probably no one will relate, a COBOL job was the first developer job of a relatively young guy like me. Crash course in tech-debt, decades worth of managerial shortsighted behavior, bureaucracy and all that. At least the naive hope provided energy to learn it better so it wasn't useless. But maybe it veered on delusion when I hoped to rewrite ALL of it in the company I was.