> If someone can improve the code by tossing away 3 years of my work But how do you objectively measure "improvement of the code"? Maybe it's something fairly

> If someone can improve the code by tossing away 3 years of my work But how do you objectively measure "improvement of the code"? Maybe it's something fairly obvious like better performance, less bugs, etc, but a lot of times it's very hard to tell if there was actually an improvement or just a different way of doing the same thing, except at the added cost of re-implementing those 3 years of work. And for the record, I agree with you in that you (we) should leave your ego at the door, and if some young whippersnapper can do better than you, then you should be able to leverage that and increase the productivity/performance of the team/company. However I've seen it happen many times where someone thinks they will improve the code but in reality (like others have said) they don't have the correct context and forget about a lot of stuff that their "improvement" should take into account but doesn't... and then once they do the "aha!" moment kicks in and they realize why it wasn't as easy to improve as they first thought.