"Polishing a turd" is missing. Making something slightly better when it should be removed. Like running Flash apps in 2026.

I think the baseline is that code can be trash and still comply with SOLID. Therefor people get frustrated over it. Getting PR:s rejected and so on.

I think it is better to have real requirements like: The code needs to be testable in a simple way.

It is misused if anything. YAGNI is about functionality. What to add or not. But it has become an excuse for being lazy. Same people that interpreted the line “Working software over comprehensive documentation” as no need for documentation.

YAGNI is usually about modularization, often in response to Java-style OOP obsession. Like you don't need to define some big protocol that's only ever going to have one implementation.

Well this is not the context I had in mind. I'm thinking of the many times I've had to break apart 3kloc react components to reuse some part just because someone decided modularity didn't matter

I mean YAGNI is usually about modularization in general, so yeah a React component would be included in that, it's not limited to just OOP. 3K loc is probably well beyond the point where it should've been split up.

I never got email routing to work. I doubt this will work in the general case.

You probably need a hefty security reimplementation if you want to add IPv6 to Github.

The normal behavior is that firewalls and proxys respond to the ICMP requests instead of forwarding them though...

Another reason for this is that often the non-tech people can inject third party scripts via CMS, GTM and so on. I remember once we had a large drop in indexed pages on Google and it turned out that a script had moved our entire site into an iframe. The marketing people who injected it was like "it is just a script".

In this market it is probably smarter to fire a large block of people. Chances are good that you can rehire some where you went too aggressive. Sucks for the people that got laid off though.