The original team may not have been the best at the task, but they still managed to deliver 100 MM in revenue. Sometimes the things they leave behind/ignore simply don’t matter to the business/useful tech.
Particular to ad tech, the lifespan of any particular software is lower than you’d expect (unless your google/Facebook). Technology that pays out big one year will become pretty meh within 3 years. In the case above I’d argue that the new tech team didn’t really understand this dynamic and so they focused on the wrong things such as rewriting functionality that didn’t matter for the future. Or making big bets on aspects of the product which were irrelevant.
To the OP, we don’t know that the lifespan of any of these php files is greater than an individual contract. If the business can be modeled as solve a contract by putting a php file on prod - rewriting may be entirely worthless as the code can be “write once, read never”.
Particular to ad tech, the lifespan of any particular software is lower than you’d expect (unless your google/Facebook). Technology that pays out big one year will become pretty meh within 3 years. In the case above I’d argue that the new tech team didn’t really understand this dynamic and so they focused on the wrong things such as rewriting functionality that didn’t matter for the future. Or making big bets on aspects of the product which were irrelevant.
To the OP, we don’t know that the lifespan of any of these php files is greater than an individual contract. If the business can be modeled as solve a contract by putting a php file on prod - rewriting may be entirely worthless as the code can be “write once, read never”.