He may have made a good living, but his customer / employer bought low quality code with lots of tech debt.
That business model only works until customers are sophisticated enough to understand tech debt. In the future, more customers will be less willing to pay the same good wages for low quality code.
Yeah, and the business people could not care less. I am on a team taking in millions of dollars from a Delphi Windows app from 1997. Zero tests, horribly mangled business logic embedded in UI handlers. Maintaining that app is not feasible. I'm rebuilding a modern version of it only because it is embarrassing to demo and is such a UX nightmare that our distributor made us commit to a new app.
