> Actually, yes. They wrote the software that is currently used in production.
> But they don't want to touch engineering with a ten-feet pole. One time they complained that engineering was taking too long to finish stuff and engineering demanded an apology.
Engineers can get very touchy about code they write. It's kind of their baby. It sounds like the highest levels of management have written what is being run, and yet not want to seem to maintain it, or directly lead the engineering org. Then they also want a great engineering team to improve what they've been doing, which inevitably ends up being ways that the initial implementation could have been done better. Sounds like a double bind for the employees. If an employee finds a much better way of doing things, the founders should be happy, but they may be sending mixed signals.
Another example is that when you've written a bunch of code, you are the expert. Anyone else working on it will be going slower, because they don't have the background that the initial author did.
If there are two sides, and one says that the code is too complex, and the other side says it's messy and unsafe I'm likely to believe both of them. For different parts of the code, you may need incremental improvement, or you may need to rewrite it. This is where you need real engineering leadership.