> web portal I was involved in developing as part of an all remote team back just before the turn of the millennium. > I can conclude that of the 6 months of ti

> web portal I was involved in developing as part of an all remote team back just before the turn of the millennium. > I can conclude that of the 6 months of time spent by 7 people creating this solution, hardly any of it related to the code. It could be completely discarded and rebuilt by one person in under two weeks. I bet he did it recently and that undermines his whole thesis. He would need to have redeveloped it before 2000, to support his argument. I would also suspect he only made a toy 80% working example and that it only needed the other 90% to be completed (e.g. administrative or developer focused features). I'm pattern matching with other developers I've heard say similar things. Information that articles ignore is often critical; moreover we judge articles based on the meta-decision of "what critical information was ignored". The article severely misses some key points. A better example that a developer is more valuable than the code: when a key member of a company goes off and greenfield develops a competitor that wins (but still not an independent measure due to confoundering effects). In some situations I would agree with the thesis, but unfortunately the article poorly argues the point.