I’ve know people in leadership who have the remaining team re-write anything from parting members when they leave, so the remaining team actually understands th

I’ve know people in leadership who have the remaining team re-write anything from parting members when they leave, so the remaining team actually understands the code base. I kind of like this idea, if the culture will support it. I have mixed feelings on maintaining other’s code. Changing 412 to 200 sounds trivial, but do you know where else in the code it may be looking for 200 vs 412? Others that may rely on it? These are where bugs are formed. Someone asked me for a “trivial” change to someone else’s code a couple weeks ago. They told me it would take 15 minutes, tops. I pushed back and refused to commit to doing it on any kind of timeline. After the call I looked at the code. I had made some other minor changes in the past (things I made that needed to be integrated into a bunch of places), but looking at the bulk of it, it was 6 years old and mostly irrelevant. Doing what they asked probably would have taken a few hours, but doing what was needed to achieve the stated goal of the code in 2025, would be more like a week+… a full re-write and some meetings with engineering and operations to better understand what is needed these days. It’s rarely as trivial as people make changes out to be. They ended up just asking for access to run the existing code, and said they’d work around me so I would have to do nothing more than add a service account for access. Fine. A week later they were asking me for code changes again, to support adding results into a ticketing system that didn’t exist when the code was written. So much for not having to do anything or 15 minutes. It’s almost never as quick and trivial as people say. What are the competing priorities of the team and individual? Where do these tasks fall? What is the culture like, if he makes that one update is he then the owner of all that code and responsible and accountable for it all? I’ve seen that pretty often, and it makes people not want to sign on to old code from others.