I Was There When It Was Written

The thousand-yard stare of someone who's survived COBOL, Fortran, and that one codebase from 1997 that nobody dares to touch. Senior devs don't just understand legacy code—they were forged in its fires, back when documentation was a sticky note and version control meant making a copy called "final_FINAL_v2_ACTUALLY_FINAL.txt". They don't fear the spaghetti; they've eaten it for breakfast for decades.