Comment by overfeed
11 hours ago
> The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add
Perhaps they tackle non-code-editing tasks like architecture, design, mentoring and code review (think staff and principal tasks)
> Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added
Yes. This os not a failure. Code has a surprisingly short half-life.
It’s not a failure that resources were spent writing code that was not needed?
Maybe it was temporarily needed, but the assumptions around it has changed and now it's unneeded. Then people built on top of that not understanding that they could simplify the whole system, and only later was that option discovered.
What would you keep from this?
It's only a failure if perfect information was available at the time, an impossibility for most people.
Write one (system) to throw away...