I have seen this so many times. You almost made me weep.

It's tragedy of commons. To stop this we need software engineers to own their own code legally.

Like journalists who retain the copyright on their articles.

This is also a reason lots of decent open source code comes out of the media industry. As much as we despise the media for its effect on society, journalists are much better than software developers in enforcing their worldview on others.

They might not blame you for it, but you're definitely in every meeting with eyes on you to fix it. Blaming the predecessor at this point is not only futile, but makes you look bad as well.

Amazon’s “away team” method is supposed to account for this. The sponsoring business unit is (supposed to be) accountable for upkeep.

What happens if the entire team gets churned in 4 years? Or is 4 years the lifespan of a single BU nowadays?

I don't see a way to mitigate this unless you care about these things from the onset, but I suppose if you're a monopoly you can just do anything you want because you have no competition.

Ah yes, nothing quite like trashing half the codebase because "a customer needs this next week" and then having to maintain that shit for years.

Sounds like software engineering is not for you.

After 15 years in I don’t see myself doing something else.

That was realistic or if someone feels like cynical take on the friendly advice from article.