Developers burn 42% of their week just reading code before they touch a single line. Not writing features. Not fixing bugs. Not reviewing pull requests. Reading. Xia et al. 2018 ran a large-scale field study with professionals and clocked it. That is nearly half your engineering payroll spent on comprehension, not construction.
Why it works this way is simple. Code is state. Every function carries the weight of every shortcut taken before it. You open user_service.rb and trace three layers of indirection to find the actual query. You grep for calculateTotal across seventeen files because the naming convention changed twice. The compiler does not need context. Humans do. Comprehension is the bottleneck because software is a graph of dependencies, not a list of instructions.
I saw this last quarter with a Stripe webhook handler. On paper it was one file. In reality it inherited from a base controller, mixed in two concern modules, and called a utility that lived in a shared gem. A junior dev estimated two hours to add a retry flag. It took six because
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