Engineers' hardest lesson is economics: patching legacy code often beats rewriting
tekbog · x · 2026-10-06
- The author argues the hardest skill for engineers is understanding economics and how the business works.
- The common engineering instinct is "we must rewrite this code or it'll be unmaintainable," but in many cases the existing code works fine.
- Patching until it's "good enough" is often the right move — not because it's technically correct, but because it's correct from the business perspective.
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