That obelisk (we call it the monolith) effect is what led to the approval in my org to take a small team and start work on replacing our nearly 25 year old pile of enterprise Java with a new codebase. I agonized over doing this, tried to fix and refactor and guide effort to just having better code, but in the end the code base has become an inscrutable, angry monolith and it's impossible to know what code improvement appeases it or triggers a series of critical production bugs.
Joel Spolsky is a smarter man than I, but his examples here are table stakes stuff compared to two decades of poorly implemented Java enterprise MVC patterns. And we don't sell software, we sell a service, and that service will continue even if our rewrite team never delivers, so the rewrite can't be more than just an expensive financial boondoggle if I'm wrong.
Joel Spolsky is a smarter man than I, but his examples here are table stakes stuff compared to two decades of poorly implemented Java enterprise MVC patterns. And we don't sell software, we sell a service, and that service will continue even if our rewrite team never delivers, so the rewrite can't be more than just an expensive financial boondoggle if I'm wrong.