Death marches (Score 1)

Aye. Joel attributes sees the impulse to rewrite as a result of programmers' laziness about supporting existing systems. But I think many programmers who were present at the original creation of software recall the compromises and mistakes that came as a result of deadline pressure. Many suits say "we have to make deadline; we can clean that stuff up later." We all know that organizations rarely have the discipline to actually do that, and Joel makes it clear that it's not such a good thing even when they do.