alt Hacker NewsIt's not really hinted at in the article, which doesn't actually mention whether the rewrite was a net gain - I presume it was or they wouldn't have written the article, and the lead-in picture paints a rosy picture, but the tone at the end suggests he's not happy with how things turned out.
But one thing that used to be a common design anti-pattern was the "version 2 problem". I think I first heard about it when Netscape were talking about how NN2 was a disaster, and they were finally happy with NN3 or NN4.
Often version 1 is a hastily thrown together mess of stuff, but it works and people like it. But there's lots of bad design decisions and you reach a limit with how far you can continue pushing that bad design before it gets too brittle to change. So you start on version 2, a complete rewrite to fix all the problems and you end up with something that's "technically perfect" but so overengineered, it's slow and everybody hates it, plus there are probably lots of workflow hoops to jump through to get things approved that you end up not making any progress, and possibly version 2 kills the product and/or the company.
The idea is that the "version 3" is a pragmatic compromise - the worse design problems from version 1 are gone, but you forego all the unnecessary stuff that you added in version 2, and finally have a product that customers like again (assuming you can convince them to come back and try v3 out) and you can build into future versions.
To a large degree I think this "version 2 problem" was a by product of waterfall design, it's certainly been less common since agile development became popular in the early 2000s and tooling made large scale refactoring easier, but even so I remember working somewhere with a v1 that the customers were using and a v2 that was a 3-year rewrite going on in parallel. None of the developers wanted to work on v1 even though that's what brought in the revenue, and v2 didn't have any of the benefit of the bug fixes accumulated over the years to fix very specific issues that were never captured in any of the scope documents.
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I definitely encountered this second-system effect recently. I have an app that works well because it was written to target a specific use case. User (and I) wanted some additional features, but the original architecture just couldn't handle these new features, so I had to do a rewrite from the ground up.
As I rewrote it, I started pulling in more "nice to haves" or else opening up the design for the potential to support more and more future features. I eventually got to a point where it became unwieldy as it had too many open-ended architectural decisions and a lot of bloat.
I ended up scrapping this v2 before releasing it and worked on a v3 but with a more focused architecture, having some things open-ended but choosing not to pursue them yet as I knew that would just introduce unneeded bloat.
I was quite aware of the second-system effect when doing all this, but I still succumbed to it. Thankfully, the v3 rewrite didn't take as long since I was able to incorporate a lot of the v2 design decisions but scaled some of them back.
My adaptation of the Version 2 Problem is “any idiot can ship version 1 of a product, but it takes skill to ship version 2”.
Usually levied at people who are so hyper focused on shipping a so-called MVP that is really demoware that they are driving us at a brick wall and commenting the entire way about what good time we are making.
This has been my experience exactly. V1 was custom built for a single client and they loved it. As we tried to expand to multiple clients the v1 was too narrowly scoped (both in UX and code architecture) so we did a full rewrite attempting to generalize the app across more workflows. V2 definitely expanded our client pool, but all our large v1 customers absolutely hated it.
We never did a full v3 rewrite, but it took about 4 years and many v3 redesigns of various features to get our legacy customers on board.
"The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile."
- Fred Brooks, 'The Mythical Man Month' (1975)