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Comment by utborin | Hacker News Reader

As someone who is in week two of spooling up on a multi-million-line codebase where most of the original authors have moved on to other projects, please, I beg you to heed this advice. I spend the vast majority of my time figuring out where a change needs to happen. The patches themselves are no more than 10% of the work.

(The other significant factor is running tests.)

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Well, at least it sounds like you have tests :)

Good point. :)

It's called job security bub. I'm not going to write out everything you need to know. Hire an expert and whatever time it takes him to figure out is how much it's going to cost you to churn through employees. Don't like it? Be a better employer so your employees don't leave.

I’m not “bub” to you, or to anyone else. I’m also not an employer, but if I were, I would absolutely not hire anyone with your attitude.

Lovely - now when you get in a car accident, your teammates get to be upset by losing you and have to reverse engineer the mess you left. Hope you don't plan to ever take vacations either - you're too important to leave.

I suppose you're being sarcastic but I certainly have met people with this attitude. Sometimes its not explicit or intentional either, just the lack of time/importance from the business side of things that creates a situation where things are poorly documented/understood and it creates a dependency on certain people/companies. Ultimately I feel its up to us developers to stress the importance of investing time on documentation, but also be mature enough ourselves to realise that this is part of the job.

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