alt Hacker News> That’s not how this goes.
Once you gain some professional experience working with software development, you'll understand that that's exactly how it goes.
I think you are failing to understand the "soft" in "software". Changing software is trivial. All software has bugs, but the only ones being worked on are those which are a) deemed worthy of being worked on, b) have customer impact.
> So now all your customers are mad, but they’re all mad for different reasons, and support is powerless to do anything about it.
That's not how it works. You are somehow assuming software isn't maintained. What do you think software developers do for a living?
Nothing I just described was hypothetical. I’ve been the developer on the rewrite crew, the EM determining if there’s anything to salvage, and the client with a list of critical bugs that aren’t getting fixed and ultimately killed the contract.
If you haven’t seen anything reach that level of tech debt with active clients, well, lucky you.