I don’t know, but the evidence shows that software engineering is not that deep of an art.
People come and go at rates that would not be sustainable in any manufacturing business.
People come and go at rates that would not be sustainable in any manufacturing business.
No, every time people switch knowledge gets lost and code quality degrades.
In part I blame accounting rules justifying investments is easier than maintenance.
Just classified ads or e-commerce platforms such as gumroad and shopify are complex enough that a single person cannot master them end to end. The domain is huge to master and takes a lots of time to master.
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.
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.