Comment by MattGaiser
5 years ago
This assumes that skill and efficacy don't come from domain specific/company specific experience.
You can be a lousy engineer, but if it is all your lousy code and you know it line by line, you will be a heck of a lot more effective than the star engineer who has been there for just a few months and hasn't learned the codebase yet.
I'm not sure that's true. I've seen incompetent engineers working away to maintain their own "house-of-cards" systems that break easily and take forever to change. Then within a matter of weeks a competent engineer comes in and replaces the whole ball of yarn with something that fast, clean, and doesn't break.
If you know what the house of cards is supposed to do, sure. If not, you can't easily replace it as then you are requirement generating again.
Most often I've seen this kind of thing done with software build pipelines where most competent engineers already have an understanding of the requirements, but this can be seen in other systems as well.
The point of these house of cards systems is that there is far more incidental complexity than there is essential complexity. The requirements are not enormously complex. The problem is that the incompetent engineer is only thinking tactically within the bounds of the system as it is currently implemented, they aren't thinking strategically about how the design could be improved to require much less work.