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Updated August 7, 2023Itโs satisfying to see your code in the hands of customers and providing them value, especially when they pay for your product. Itโs even more fulfilling to write code that has a high impact, especially when it comes to helping your business grow. If youโre lucky, the code you write may become necessary to the success of the business, at which point it becomes business critical.
Business-critical code is typically complex because itโs required to handle multiple use cases for many different customers. The complexity grows over time as new use cases are discovered and new customers are supported. However, business-critical code doesnโt necessarily equate to state-of-the-art code. Surprisingly, the most profitable code is sometimes rather outdated and boring. The most important part is that the code works, is reliable, gets the job done, and is in the hands of the customer.
All business-critical code becomes legacy code over time. Itโs just a fact. When you have a codebase thatโs necessary to the success of the business, making changes to the code can be risky if not planned carefully. Small improvements add up over time, but you probably wonโt be refactoring half the codebase to a new architecture. As they say, โIf it ainโt broke, donโt fix it.โ
As long as the critical systems are in place and still making money for the business, there will always be a need for people to maintain and support those systems. Depending on the expertise and domain knowledge required, you may be able to leverage your knowledge of the codebase for job security and a rewarding salary.
Keep in mind there are trade-offs, as with most things related to software engineering. Although job security is important to a lot of people, you should expect to be working on possibly outdated technology and working with code that other people wrote. Legacy code can often be difficult and time-consuming to change and stressful to debug. Itโs certainly not for everyone, but some people prefer to work on legacy systems rather than the ambiguity of newer codebases.
With most legacy systems, things move slowly. Youโll need multiple approvals to make any significant changes to the system due to the risk involved. While some developers donโt mind the slower pace, others may find it frustrating to get anything done. You may be better suited to work on projects where youโre building new products or iterating on existing ones, especially early in your career.
A common misconception among new developers is that youโll be working on interesting problems and engineering state-of-the-art solutions all the time. While this may be the case for some products, more often than not, the code that makes money will be rather boring.
โexampleโA checkout page for an e-commerce company is one example of code that is almost never state of the art. Itโs a well-known problem with well-known solutions, and itโs not exactly the most exciting part of the codebase. But every single transaction in an e-commerce business flows through that page, so the code that powers that checkout page is code that makes money.
While somewhat counterintuitive, a common path to adding value is to ship code that reduces cost for your customers or for your company. If a product solves a customerโs pain point better, faster, or cheaper than if they built it themselves, the customer benefits from a return on their investment. When a customer purchases your companyโs product, theyโre doing it in order to free up capital or other resources. This allows them to shift resources to help grow other parts of their business. Itโs a win-win for both your customers and your company.
While saving your customers money is a great way to add value for your company, writing code that reduces cost for your employer is another opportunity for you to have a significant impact. Operational efficiencies are vital in highly competitive industries, as that can make the difference in whether the company makes or loses money in a given quarter or year.
Businesses are incentivized to control their costs and increase their efficiency as they work to produce more goods and services with less resources. This usually means building internal automation tools, scaling existing infrastructure, and streamlining processes to gain efficiency. While you may not get to work on projects like these right away, there are things you can focus on that help reduce the cost of delivering software, such as writing clean and modular code.