Over my 45+ years programming I’d guess about 25% of my time got spent on code that never went live. Sometimes the project got scrapped during development and s

Over my 45+ years programming I’d guess about 25% of my time got spent on code that never went live. Sometimes the project got scrapped during development and started over with new requirements or tools. Of the remainder more than half of the code had a short lifespan once it went live. Less than five years, some of it just a few months or a year. I’ve worked on a handful of projects that have lifespans of a decade or more, but they stand out as the exceptions. The long-lived code stayed in production mainly because of organizational inertia, not because of exceptional code quality. I keep all that in mind when tempted to polish a likely turd in the name of “code quality” and “best practices.”