As a new grad myself, I completely agree with the author’s freak out when seeing “inefficient” looking code. But I feel like this applies to basically all aspects of a company life as a new grad software engineer. For me at least, there seems to be a lot of inefficient things going on in every aspect of the company. Maybe the author is right in that there is a reason behind those seemingly “inefficient” things. However, the inefficiencies are there because sometimes, people who have been working there for years just have become used to it.
One thing you learn over time is many of those code horrors are there for a good reason, put there by someone solving a real problem, in the best possible way given time constraints. It is just the reason is lost to history. This is one reason the "big re-write" almost always fails. You are throwing away all those hard learned lessons just because they aren't apparent on reading of the code.
That is also true (perhaps less often) for byzantine process related procedures.
