This paper describes the environment where many new recruits work in when they join a new organization. For the folks still fulltime students, unless you are very lucky, you must be prepared to deal with a messy metropolis once you start your career. Most of the jobs out there today are to replace baby boomers that are retiring, and work on legacy systems that are usually messy metropolis. So refactoring and reverse engineering skills are very critical and hot in the market place.
Many legacy systems started as a small project, but have grown over the years into messy systems because of the constant need of delivery new functionalities under aggressive schedule. I agree with the author that it was very brave for the organization to take the step of rewriting the application. For some critical systems a very thorough analysis is needed to asset the risk and the cost of rewriting the system. From my experience rewriting messy systems has never worked because they are deployed on thousand of machines around the world and the ability to understand and refactor it is the only option.
The author mentioned some great factor to consider in order to make a good architecture. This is very important and useful when building a new system. Unfortunately most professionals do not get the chance to build new systems. They work with existing systems and spend their time either fixing bugs or testing code written by others. So, the ability to figure out the design from the messy code is even more valuable.
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