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I find that to be almost entirely untrue. I am far more amazed by how long things I have written stay around. Websites I helped create in 2005, integrations t

I find that to be almost entirely untrue. I am far more amazed by how long things I have written stay around. Websites I helped create in 2005, integrations that just hummed along without anyone paying attention to them for over 10 years, and tiny utility desktop apps that people just keep using 'cause they do the job. I've definitely decided that I'd better put some spit and polish on things because it almost certainly is going to last longer than I expect.

WJW 6y ago
There's a really big power law for this though. Some of my code has been running for close to 15 years now and I fully expect it to run at least that long into the future. At the same time I also have written software that got decommissioned after a year because the business division was spun down. The highest value code I ever wrote was probably a 50-100 line script that collected some data requested for due diligence and which eventually clinched a >200 million USD investment round for the company. That script was never used again after that.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Hah. Same experience here. When I get asked at interviews "what is your recent work you are most proud of?" and I can't bring myself to cite my Elixir or Rust work (even if I did some pretty solid work there in the last years) and the first thing that immediately springs to mind is how I actually invested two days in a shell script that did a job (making PDF invoices in a system that wasn't meant for that but the data was in the DB) that the management thought is going to take 3 months. Since then I changed my LinkedIn headline to: "Solving problems with technology". That's what people care about. Not which language we use.
godot 6y ago
Probably depends on where you work? I've worked in startups for most of my career (15 years) and I find the GP's comment more true. 2 companies I've worked for no longer exist (including my own startup), and 1 company I worked for turned into a unicorn -- I left that co 7 years ago and I'm fairly certain none of the code I wrote during my 6 years of work there is still operating anymore now.

WJW 6y ago

There's a really big power law for this though. Some of my code has been running for close to 15 years now and I fully expect it to run at least that long into the future. At the same time I also have written software that got decommissioned after a year because the business division was spun down. The highest value code I ever wrote was probably a 50-100 line script that collected some data requested for due diligence and which eventually clinched a >200 million USD investment round for the company. That script was never used again after that.

pdimitar 6y ago
Hah. Same experience here. When I get asked at interviews "what is your recent work you are most proud of?" and I can't bring myself to cite my Elixir or Rust work (even if I did some pretty solid work there in the last years) and the first thing that immediately springs to mind is how I actually invested two days in a shell script that did a job (making PDF invoices in a system that wasn't meant for that but the data was in the DB) that the management thought is going to take 3 months. Since then I changed my LinkedIn headline to: "Solving problems with technology". That's what people care about. Not which language we use.

godot 6y ago

Probably depends on where you work? I've worked in startups for most of my career (15 years) and I find the GP's comment more true. 2 companies I've worked for no longer exist (including my own startup), and 1 company I worked for turned into a unicorn -- I left that co 7 years ago and I'm fairly certain none of the code I wrote during my 6 years of work there is still operating anymore now.