For a major undertaking, sure. If you're a start-up, odds are that you have one product, and you can't afford for it to stagnate while it's scrapped and rewritten or while the developers layer hacks on hacks to fix bugs created by the last round of hacks.
Even a start-up, though, has tons of code that is not part of the main codebase. A pile of monitoring scripts, a program that generates an arbitrarily large amount of data for a test database, the company's blog, internal mailing list software, etc. When you have fewer than 50 employees, it is okay if half of those codebases are ugly hacks.
Even a start-up, though, has tons of code that is not part of the main codebase. A pile of monitoring scripts, a program that generates an arbitrarily large amount of data for a test database, the company's blog, internal mailing list software, etc. When you have fewer than 50 employees, it is okay if half of those codebases are ugly hacks.