“We can’t change that. It’s in the legacy system.”
The legacy system is the company’s excuse for everything it refuses to fix. It was built in 2003 by someone who left in 2007. Nobody fully understands it. Documentation doesn’t exist. The one person who knew how it worked retired.
The legacy system runs on fear. Not code — fear. The fear that touching it will break something. The fear that replacing it will cost too much. The fear that admitting it’s broken means admitting it should’ve been fixed ten years ago.
Companies will spend millions working around a legacy system rather than thousands replacing it. Because replacing it requires someone to make a decision, and the legacy system’s primary function is absorbing decisions nobody wants to make.