4 ms·

> One of the important lessons you need to learn is that code is a liability not an asset I cannot upvote this enough.

by vbtemp 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
RivieraKid 11y ago
This is simply not true. If code was an liability, it would be profitable to transwer owenership of it to other people. I haven't noticed any software company doing that.
- e28eta 11y ago
  Maybe not what you meant, but I immediately thought of SaaS. Or various companies' policies of open sourcing non-core software. Both of those are along the lines of "I need code to do this thing, but I don't want to be the (sole) maintainer." You could write your own language, IDE, OS, build system, source control, networking library, logging library, shopping cart, payment processor, etc.
- pc86 11y ago
  That's an overly pedantic use of the word "liability." It simply means that all things being equal, it is better to do $THING in 50 lines of code than it is to do it in in 500.
- lojack 11y ago
  This is easy to explain when you treat third parties as liabilities as well. For many companies this is a bigger liability than maintaining the code in house. I recently made the decision to have a third party build a component as opposed to doing it in house. The cost and time to build a component in house vs using a third party ended up being a wash, but the third party offered to maintain and support a solution so this presented less risk to us. This major risk we incurred was in vendor lock-in. These types of trade offs happen all the time. Think about virtually any SAAS offering that could otherwise be built in house.
- a-priori 11y ago
  In software, there's a whole industry around this: we call it SaaS and/or cloud services. And in fact, it's basically what it means to be a 'services' company. Your customers are paying you to move that liability I mentioned onto your balance sheet instead of theirs.

4 ms·

> One of the important lessons you need to learn is that code is a liability not an asset I cannot upvote this enough.

by vbtemp 11y ago

> One of the important lessons you need to learn is that code is a liability not an asset I cannot upvote this enough.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
RivieraKid 11y ago
This is simply not true. If code was an liability, it would be profitable to transwer owenership of it to other people. I haven't noticed any software company doing that.
- e28eta 11y ago
  Maybe not what you meant, but I immediately thought of SaaS. Or various companies' policies of open sourcing non-core software. Both of those are along the lines of "I need code to do this thing, but I don't want to be the (sole) maintainer." You could write your own language, IDE, OS, build system, source control, networking library, logging library, shopping cart, payment processor, etc.
- pc86 11y ago
  That's an overly pedantic use of the word "liability." It simply means that all things being equal, it is better to do $THING in 50 lines of code than it is to do it in in 500.
- lojack 11y ago
  This is easy to explain when you treat third parties as liabilities as well. For many companies this is a bigger liability than maintaining the code in house. I recently made the decision to have a third party build a component as opposed to doing it in house. The cost and time to build a component in house vs using a third party ended up being a wash, but the third party offered to maintain and support a solution so this presented less risk to us. This major risk we incurred was in vendor lock-in. These types of trade offs happen all the time. Think about virtually any SAAS offering that could otherwise be built in house.
- a-priori 11y ago
  In software, there's a whole industry around this: we call it SaaS and/or cloud services. And in fact, it's basically what it means to be a 'services' company. Your customers are paying you to move that liability I mentioned onto your balance sheet instead of theirs.