One of the Principal Engineer tenets here is "Respect What Came Before."
Principal Engineers are grateful to our predecessors. We appreciate the value of working systems and the lessons they embody. We understand that many problems are not essentially new.
Replying to @thegoodoommen and @armahillo
Some of the biggest mistakes I have made as an engineer come down to not treating legacy code with the respect it deserves. These days I make a point of calling it "legendary code" instead.