No, it is the result of a much older design being used much longer than maybe it should have been (remember when there was only two digits for year?). There are still some legacy COBOL programs in use today that aren't experiencing issues so there is no incentive to change them to current technology. And the cost of wholesale changes due to age is cost prohibitive. I was part of an initiative to update our scheduling service. IT pushed back because they estimated it would cost over $1M to figure out who owned and needed what was currently running than to just let it run.

I'm not of the mind that this approach is necessarily bad, but what is bad how it's being used. Reusing old codes is fine, but when you don't check to see if it's in use for current transactions is a failure. So as usual, people are the weak link in many systems.