A comment on Offshoring Shows How Valuable Code Is floored me: "Another answer [to the 'what do you value?' question] could be to show cost reduction for the quarter. Its the old short term thinking to make Wall Street happy."
First, I concluded that "cost reduction" is somehow separate from "offshoring production of COBOL". Which confuses me, because I thought cost reduction was the driving force behind offshoring the production of COBOL. That can't be right, because the comment reinforces the premise, but is worded as though it disagrees.
Let's assume the comment is challenging my conclusion (code captures corporate knowledge, and should be treated as something of value). In which case, the comment means that it's possible that short term cost containment is more valuable than the knowledge capture. Okay. That's what everyone who is using cheap off-shore development resources is already saying.
It appears that the comment is the same as my statement "So the knowledge capture is of no value, therefore we can outsource it." Which was the point I was trying to refute, but didn't do a good enough job of stating the contradiction. I'll try again.
My claim is the following:
Knowledge capture has value, that's why we're producing code in the first place. We produce code (COBOL, Java, doesn't matter which) to capture knowledge.
Contradicting this is the following:
Knowledge capture is so expensive, we outsource it so that we only partially capture the knowledge. Indeed, we hand considerable knowledge to our vendors.
Hopefully, this -- by itself -- shows that claiming "short term thinking to make Wall Street happy" involves a basic contradiction. A business will both value producing code and hate the cost of producing code. It will value the code and simultaneously treat it as a liability -- a cost to be reduced.
I'll try my conclusion again, also. I suggest we pick one. Either value code, and do it well, or stop producing code and start downloading open source and buying packages.