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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Respectfully, commenting code and making it easily readable don't usually add to the bottom line. So while we all miss playing Pinball, it would be a waste of money to the shareholders.

This game was another casualty of maximizing value towards shareholders and away from all other stakeholders.

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I disagree. Sure, in the short term, taking on that technical debt may have made sense, but in the long term, this is a perfect example of how technical debt added significant maintenance costs to a project.

What if dropping Pinball was not an option? The cost to the shareholder would have been much higher than it needed to be.

There's some commonly repeated (and likely even true to some extent) that ~60-70% of the cost of a software system is in maintenance. Which to me, sounds like if you're the contractor providing the system, that means 60-70% of the value is in the maintenance. It does mean taking something of a hit upfront so make things maintainable, but with the right billing structure you can be adding to the profits by Doing It Right as you go. It's certainly still a gamble though; you might not get the maintenance contract. You might be billing hourly and thus don't see any extra cash for your timesavings (and indeed, might see less).

I would suspect the programmer was lazy or rushed, and wasn't considering shareholder value.

Rushed is really the same thing, even if the words "shareholder value" weren't in their minds at the time.

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