Comment by whatever1
3 days ago
Have you ever seen a tech company calling a 65y.o. retired wizard to debug a system failure? I doubt it.
In manufacturing it so regular, that typically senior technical people retire as soon as possible to form their consulting firms and charge much higher rates, just by selling their multi-decade expertise back to their company.
In oil & gas, there are consulting firms that their role is to just store and provide domain knowledge to companies who lost their experts.
In tech, consulting firms provide cheap labor.
Software is code and code is documentation. Do you know MAME that is documenting the arcade consoles as code? And that they work is just a side effect and is not an intended goal?
That doesn't mean that MAME is a trivial project. Far from it. It'll take you several years to get proficient with the whole codebase.
Just that unlike manufacturing, the software is much more self contained and everything is in those files including how to build them.