Joel said that in the context of begging programmers to learn some micro-economics. It's fair to treat maintenance as an economic tradeoff, but the keyword is t

Joel said that in the context of begging programmers to learn some micro-economics. It's fair to treat maintenance as an economic tradeoff, but the keyword is tradeoff: it's not just a list of pros and cons, but interlinked relations (just as supply-demand) where doing more/less of X necessitates more/less of Y. Beyond that real engineering programs will also at least have some sort of 'engineering economics' component that if nothing else exposes one to the fact that say a mechanical engineering company will use present value / future value / maintenance cost / replacement cost / lifetime cost calculations and estimates all the time for machinery and so forth, some of which could be applied to software. Since Joel's "Joel Test" includes things like "Do you fix bugs before writing new code?" I doubt code maintenance was high on his mind when he wrote the bit about crazy ideas. Can any company even answer yes to that these days? Do they have a strong economic argument? (Best I see is "P1 and P2 bugs closed before release".)