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by simplyluke 2732 days ago
Agree 100%, along with accompanying documentation that lays out architecture, rationale, challenges, etc. All of those are invaluable for any code that will outlive the tenure of the developers who built it. And given how often people in tech change jobs that's virtually all code.
1 comments

Oh yes. And even disregarding tenure, you have cases like illness (see e.g. the Word 1.0 postmortem[0], page 14, talking about losing a key developer), or people changing project.

One time, I inherited a big steaming pile of spaghetti my co-worker wrote to meet a tight deadline, before being shifted to another project. That code implemented one of the key functions of the application, and half a year later, the customer demanded extensive changes. Believe me, I would have paid half my monthly salary the just to have a third of the comments that we see in this Kubernetes file.

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[0] - http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/...