this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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I mean, when you look at old walls made of quarry stone, they kinda look like this and still hold.
Also brick walls don't really go through iterative changes, which is an important issue with tech debt.
If the wall works, then it works
A software project will work now, but may not hold up when you need to change something
Well that's not true. I live in a Soviet era house that had an entire second floor built on top of it. We've had to drill through the brick walls to replace the natural gas pipes with pipes that run outside the walls, we've had to dig under the foundation when we got connected to the city's sewer system (again, Soviet-built), and again when the main water pipe burst and threatened to wash out the foundation. If the load-bearing walls had been constructed to the same "it works" standard as the things we've had to fix, we wouldn't have a house anymore.
Agreeing with you, just adding to it.
The same thing happens to any old house, not only soviet ones.
In my city most houses are close to 200 years old. That's well before plumbing going into every flat, well before electricity and well before any of the other cool stuff like central heating, internet and so on.
Most of these houses don't even retain the original apartment layout.
Houses are living things that see a lot of change when they get old enough.