The other day I watched an engineer spend three days on a piece of the codebase nobody had touched in two years. Should've been a four-hour fix. The senior who built it was gone. The documentation was sparse. The code made sense only if you'd been in the room when the decisions got made.
They could've asked me to rewrite it. I would have. Instead, they sat with it. Read through the git history. Traced the logic forward and backward. Built a mental model of why each piece was there. By the end, they didn't just fix the bug. They understood the system.
I asked them why they didn't just escalate it.
"I needed to know how this worked," they said. "If I'd just had you fix it, I wouldn't know."
I checked in twice that week. Both times they were still in it. I had a deadline breathing down my neck and a fix I could've written before lunch. That three-day tax on understanding used to be everywhere in engineering. It still is, but it's getting scarcer, and we're very proud of that.
