By year two, the patterns are harder to ignore. The codebase is growing harder to work with. Changes in one area break things in another. Every new feature requires more time to implement than it should because the underlying architecture was not designed for the scale the business has reached.
A key engineer or two may have left. Their knowledge left with them. New hires take 3–4 months to get up to speed, if they can get up to speed at all on undocumented legacy code.
What this costs: Development velocity drops by 40–50% from year one. Bug fix cycles lengthen. Security vulnerabilities go unaddressed longer than they should.
