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Discussion on: What’s an unpopular software opinion you have?

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Jonathan Dickinson

Software/code is a liability, solutions to problems and your bank of knowledge are the real assets.

Every year you or your employer spends money maintaining an aging codebase. Bugs, vulnerabilities, support tickets. Strictly (and realistically) speaking, code would be in the "liability" column in an accounting book.

On the other hand, you or your employer has a large amount of people who are subject matter experts on your product. If you put every one of those people into a room, and magically herded those cats, you could probably come up with a better product. They know why a specific quirk exists, they know why one piece of code has to be horribly complex.

I've learned two things from this. Invest in people, not code. I hate my code, but I love what it does.