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Comment by jrumbut | Hacker News Reader

I thought "what a bold title, if someone's figured it out we can just close HN" and upon reading, hey it's not far off.

The following is a wonderful point I have hardly ever heard said directly:

"The main value in software is not the code produced, but the knowledge accumulated by the people who produced it."

It's not that they have the knowledge but that the knowledge is now encoded in software and available to anyone else - software shares knowledge without the users having to learn it (for example having to learn which five systems need to have their names enters in order to pay their parking fine

This is not what I have experienced, at least not in real world software with mediocre documentation. Usually the software encodes only the "how", but the important parts are "why" and what aspects of the original problem led to that design. Good teams learn how to transfer and adapt in the next project. Starting with the software only, lots of that can only be reverse engineered.

That was something I picked up from one of the more experienced software devs when I started - in his code there were far fewer comments saying "This section does x and y", than there were comments saying "We are doing x and y because ..."

weird, I've heard it said frequently for decades in various forms,

"value your knowledge workers"

"your employees are your most valuable asset"

Some companies don't treat employees well, and some employees at good companies feel they are not treated well enough

If the above quotes do not strike a chord with you, you might just be a software engineer who thinks you're more important than non-SEs.

The difference, for me, is that neither of those quotes explain why you should value knowledge workers or why employees are valuable (maybe hiring is expensive, maybe turnover reduces morale, etc), nor do they suggest the mechanism that creates this value.

I'm sure another author has put the same sentiment out there before, but it's not every day I see such a nice phrasing of it.

> neither of those quotes explain why you should value knowledge

I mean, the point of short quotes is to be memorable and get future listeners to hunt for the reason behind them. "The sun will rise tomorrow" may also be meaningless for some people on its own.

Nothing wrong with elaborating on this subject again via a blog post, I was just pointing out to the commenter who's never heard this expressed before that it has a long history, that's all.

Employees are not assets because the company doesn't own them.

True but they produce value which goes on to become an asset, in this case the knowledge captured and organised in to software.

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