One of my early blog posts that I wrote nearly 10 years ago that I called "Sony Baloney" discussed how the electronics giant cultivated some unusual, yet highly successful practices. One of the practices that Sony is known for is taking young and inexperienced engineers and putting them on new product development, while their senior engineers focus on reworking and redesigning their successful products to be more cost-effective. I consider this to be a very wise practice and so do they.
We want innovation in new products but we always want to balance it so that our work is maintainable and cost-effective. The electronics industry pays a lot of attention to this because manufacturing is expensive. Of course, there are no manufacturing costs, per se, in the software industry but there are maintenance and ongoing costs for software and that’s actually where the bulk of our funds are spent. So, paying attention to the maintainability of our code is quite important yet often overlooked.
