Nate McMaster (indirectly) talks dollars and cents:
Early in my software engineering career, a senior engineer at Microsoft told me “the best solution is one that requires no new code.” At the time, I thought this was nonsense. Is not my role as a software engineer to write code? Why would writing less or no code be better? More code means more bug fixes, more features, more services, and more tools. So why is more not always better?
Fast forward to 2023 – now I am the most senior engineer on a team, and I give the same guidance. Prefer solutions that require less or no code.
What led to this shift in perspective?
Read on for Nate’s answer, which is well-written and makes a lot of sense. It’s also close to a topic I’ve written about in the past.