> Or that they will make a team that writes a completely new version of the code
Isn't that one way of the "cleanup and re-design work"?
Yeah, it happened at the end of the last outsourcing boom. It's often a very quiet transformation though - a tacit recognition that a fashion failed doesn't get the same PR as "groundbreaking new business fad" because to do so too explicitly would humiliate all of the executives who were the driving force the original fashion.
Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.
Publications like the Economist or the WSJ that drive a lot of this hype among the investor and executive classes are loath to point out that their readers and owners are the proverbial emperor not wearing any clothes.
One of the benefits of tech unions (if they existed in any meaningful way) would be to point out where the emperor is naked in a way that is a bit harder to ignore than the kerfuffle that occurs inside hacker news threads or subreddits dedicated to experienced devs.
Has this ever happened besides the Y2K fixes?
Wouldn't it be much more likely that the companies will simply go under? Or that they will make a team that writes a completely new version of the code, somewhat like Mac OS X was a replacement of MacOS 9 and not a cleanup.