The Previous Guy Is Always An Idiot

Every developer who inherits code thinks they're walking into a crime scene. The boss wants to throw away weeks of work because the new hire hasn't even looked at the codebase yet but has already diagnosed it as terminal. Classic move.

Here's the thing: that "terrible" code? It probably works. It handles edge cases you don't know exist yet. It has workarounds for bugs in third-party libraries that were fixed two versions ago but your company is still on version 1.2 from 2015. But sure, let's rewrite everything in the hot new framework you learned last weekend.

Six months later, this guy's code will be the "disaster" the next developer wants to burn down. It's the circle of life, except instead of lions we have overconfident engineers with imposter syndrome and a god complex simultaneously.