Well, to be fair, that romantic image plays pretty strongly on a desire to see my work as something of a legacy--something that outlives my own mortality. I might be unique in that romantic desire, but somehow I doubt it.
Your engineering manager is on to something. I feel like that romantic desire, ironically, gets in the way of making real progress 99% of the time; even the code I'm really proud of, given enough time, will probably end up irrelevant, if only because I'll have learned so much more in all that time. It's easy to think of the act of writing as the hardest part of "writing code." But, really, it's all the learning in all the years prior that's most difficult. So, really, "throwing away" code and starting over isn't actually all that costly. Throwing away engineers, their experience, or skills is what gets expensive.
With that said, one of these days I'll start writing my "The Art of Computer Programming" ...
Your engineering manager is on to something. I feel like that romantic desire, ironically, gets in the way of making real progress 99% of the time; even the code I'm really proud of, given enough time, will probably end up irrelevant, if only because I'll have learned so much more in all that time. It's easy to think of the act of writing as the hardest part of "writing code." But, really, it's all the learning in all the years prior that's most difficult. So, really, "throwing away" code and starting over isn't actually all that costly. Throwing away engineers, their experience, or skills is what gets expensive.
With that said, one of these days I'll start writing my "The Art of Computer Programming" ...