[velosol]

I found this section interesting:

>[Non-programmer programmers becoming/being SMEs] is great for a while; finally someone can fix all the annoying known issues in that space that have been lingering for a while.

Followed a whole sentence later with:

>If something is only getting done because someone that "isn’t a dev resource” wants to work on it, then that’s a sign that it shouldn’t be getting done.

Yes it's qualified that it's "a sign" but if you have annoying known issues that are customer facing (even if only internal customers) sitting open in perpetuity you're probably under resourcing those areas. If you're doing that it's likely that those areas could disappear and the company would be better off or should be charged at a higher rate to external customers so they are properly maintained.

As a whole having the codebase be accessible is just open source writ small: a small number of people will be interested enough to take part and they'll often not be fully aware of the code culture when they submit a PR leading to more work for the maintainer. But they were also interested or annoyed enough to clear the hurdle of submitting one and maybe that's a sign something should be getting done in that area.

[ghiculescu]

I like this metaphor. I think we’d get a lot of value out of structuring our internal processes more like an open source project.