I’m find it amusing that we’ve reached the point where developers can no longer imagine a shop that writes its own software.
Within the codebase, the infrastructure and tooling is by far the most important aspect in terms of productivity and stability of daily work process.
If you take the time to position yourself accordingly, you can make the leverage (i.e. software that builds the software) work in virtually any way you'd like for it to. If it doesn't feel like you are cheating at the game, you probably didn't dream big enough on the tooling and process. Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, et. al. are not the pinnacle of software engineering by a long shot.
Unless you happen to be one of the very rare companies that sells source code and not built artefacts, your asset is the built artefact and your code is the expense you take on to get it.
Having less code to get the business outcome only makes sense when you see the code as a cost, not a thing of value itself.
> your asset is the built artefact
Therefore, summarized, you mean that the sourcecode needed to generate the resulting <app/service/whatever> is a liability, but that the result can be an asset (if it does generate external revenue, or internally lowers costs ,etc..)?
I personally never thought about this kind of separation - interesting.
It's easy for us as developers to think that source code is valuable - but this leads to problems like never removing code "in case it's needed", or with an in-house dev team developing systems you could get off the shelf.
If code is an asset, then it makes a lot more sense to write stuff yourself: you not only get the artefact, you also get the source.
If it's a liability, then it makes a lot more sense to let someone else bear the costs of that liability, especially if they have economies of scale, except where you can't get your desired outcome other than writing code.
This is of course technically incorrect. It's perhaps more accurate to say that source code requires upkeep and is expensive to maintain. That tends to draw less interest and discussion, because it's "obvious." Except as an industry we're overall pretty lousy at paying the required upkeep on code.
The moment you want to minimize something while still achieving your goals you know it's a liability. Do you want the same profits or solutions with a smaller team? Then the team is a liability. If team were an asset you'd be trying to hire a bigger team without any work for them to do. If you had the chance to double egg production with constant demand, you'd eat or kill half your hens. They're a liability.
That's only true if you assign an appropriate meaning to the word derogatory.
Why not just throw it away, then?
If you can't, it's (IMO) because you're stuck with the burden of having to write and maintain that code.
If it's an asset, why not just write more?
Companies do write more.
So in your analogy, what's the software equivalent of replacing the drain pipe?
Its an asset. Like many (virtually all, other than pure financial) assets, it has associated expenses; maintenance, depreciation, and similar expenses are the norm for non-financial assets.
> Unless you happen to be one of the very rare companies that sells source code and not built artefacts, your asset is the built artefact and your code is the expense you take on to get it.
No, things that are instrumental to producing product are still assets, not just the things that you sell. That's true if its machines on your factory floor, if its the actual real estate of the factory, or vehicles that you use to deliver goods. And all of these assets, like a codebase, have associated expenses.
The whole "code is a liability, not an asset" line is something from people who might understand code, but definitely don't understand assets and liabilities.
Its more just a mental footnote that the contract with the customer is what is valuable, and the code is either supporting that value or destroying it. So if you can have the same contract with the customer for less code that's the outcome to strive for.
More lines of code is not equal to better. What you need is better lines of code, which usually means less of them.
Let a dev loose on a codebase and they could add value, but they could also be subtracting it. Hmm maybe developers are the liability.
Perhaps the amount of code is the wrong metric to optimize. Perhaps it is readability, simplicity, maintainability that we really want and those are harder to put into numbers than LOC.
Airplanes have many functional parts and many not-so-functional parts. There are parts of the airplane that will, if removed, prevent it from working in various critical ways.
But from another perspective, all of those parts, decorative, functional, or essential, are liabilities, dragging your airplane back toward the ground when you want it to stay up in the air. The fact that a particular piece is important doesn't mean it's less of a problem having it; it means you have to suck it up and work around the problem.
Source code is like this. The mere fact of its existence causes problems. Some of it you can't do without. But it's causing problems anyway, and if you can do without it, you want to.
So you delete your source code after you ship an app? That doesn't make sense. The source code is one of every software company's greatest assets which is why we have created so many tools to keep track of it like version control, automated testing etc. Otherwise there would be no point in clean code, code documentation etc, just write something that solves the problem and done! No need to even check in the code, just build a binary locally and ship!
I understand the point, but saying that code is a liability and not an asset is false no matter how you look at it. Source code solves a lot of problems you can't solve with binaries, it lets you adapt to change much better. So instead of saying that code is a liability, use the business saying "Focus on your core business", meaning don't write code for things that isn't your core business.
I didn't say that. I said it was a liability. "Don't write code for things that aren't your core business" doesn't tell you that you should try to minimize the amount of code that addresses your core business. But you should.
Likewise, code could be many lines because it is well formatted and robust. Alternatively it could be long because there's a lot of repetition and bloat. It could be short because it is very targeted to what it needs to be, or it could be very short because the developer used a lot of unreadable code-golf tricks.
In any complex system, you have optimization problems. Very rarely is the answer to an optimization problem simply to minimize an isolated variable. You can not say a lighter airplane is better than a heavier one without asking why it's lighter; likewise a smaller codebase with fewer lines can not be called better unless you know why it is smaller.
Just because a plane could get off the ground without something does not mean that cutting that thing to save weight will move the plane closer to its optimal design. Likewise just because the code base could be reduced does not mean that actually makes it more maintainable and better performing.
If a business owns a car that they use to make a profit, guess where the car is in the balance sheet?
> Having the biggest codebase(car) is not a benefit.
Sure, lines of code is not how you measure the value of code as an asset, just like tons of gross weight isn't how you measure the value of vehicles as an asset.
That doesn't mean code, and vehicles, aren't assets.
“Lines of code are a measure associated with maintenance cost, not asset value” is a reasonable statement. “Code is a liability, not an assset” is not.
To get technical about it, code whose discounted future maintenance costs exceed the discounted revenue it is expected to bring in or helps to bring in is a liability. Some maintenance costs are invisible, such as having team members leave; leading to recruiting expenses to seek a replacement and the associated ramp time when they're hired. Companies are often not equipped to assess the cost side in any way that approaches reality and just stick the cost of the "code" on the balance sheet as capex. Having an asset on the balance sheet after doing this doesn't mean you have an asset in reality.
> The whole "code is a liability, not an asset" line is something from people who might understand code, but definitely don't understand assets and liabilities.
Code can be a net liability. Unless you are looking purely at the asset side of the balance sheet and ignoring liabilities, which tends not to be very useful.
Dependencies in general, like 95% (or more) of the kind we see in modern package managers? No, they're mostly untested liabilities and the majority of them could be rewritten in an afternoon.
This whole discussion is a bit strange. GP clearly uses dependencies, just not as much as everyone else today. I don't understand why the fixation with polarizing the discussion into "use lots of dependencies" vs "write everything from scratch".
Dependancies are inevitable.
I'm OK with depending on glibc and _almost_ as OK with depending on openssl. And of course I inevitable rely on gcc/clang/CPU microcode/transistor photolithography...
But those examples are a world away from npm pulling in 12+ levels of random dependancies of unknown origin buried so deep it's all but impossible to audit - and the segment of "the software comm8unity" who built that particular house-of-cards and then promotes it blindly to the segment of the software community who obliviously use it to generate code that runs on expensive production platforms in business critical applications just boggles my mind.
(And makes me alternately weep and drink heavily - having to support exactly that in production because "velocity" and "moving fast and breaking things" are considered more important that quality or security by both management and clients - both of who will happily point the finger of blame elsewhere when the inevitable happens, in spite of having been repeatedly warned... :sigh: )
Believe me, as someone who cares about code, I far prefer a world where I know how every line of code in a system I'm building works. In fact, in my free time, I do just that. But my job as an in-house software dev for a non-tech company is to solve business problems with technology, and as with every business problem, there is an acceptable level of risk that you need to be OK taking. In our case in this post-COVID world, people's jobs are literally depending on us iterating quickly.
I spend a lot of time talking to "full stack developers" who came out of graphic design into front end web dev and then fell into nodejs backend dev, who's only "architecture" course was about drawing buildings and who's main complaints about security requirements are that bars across windows look ugly. A startlingly large number of them don't even know there are things they don't know. I'd say fewer than half of them could tell you what OWASP was, and fewer than 10% of them could tell you what SQLi or XSS was, and whether their sites need to consider them as attack vectors. Most of them just say "I use $frameworkDeJour, it handles all the security stuff!"
(BTW, last time I needed to supply dynamic PDFs in a web app, one of the good fullstack-via-FE-and-graphic-design devs build the PDF generation in the browser (using some random js/pdf library) so we could just feed it JSON from the backend. Made me sleep better at night doing it that way...)
I know _of_ HIPPA regulations, but not being in either the US or in healthcare records, I have very very vague notions of the HIPPA requirements. Same with PCI compliance - I know there are important rules and requirements, which I don't fully understand the details of, because I choose to use 3rd parties like Stripe to handle all my CC processing so that those requirements don't apply to me (with there exception of needing to understand the risks of webapps and problems like XSS in the context of Stripe-powered CC forms).
The reason is very obvious - the most expensive part of most projects is the people. Why pay them to write code that you can just download for free? That's a tremendous waste of money.
Most of us just do what we're told and we're in no position to question the "company's priorities" -- nevermind the fact that very often those priorities actually align with the techie's vision.