>Then you get employee turn over where new employees don't get "arcane" knowledge passed down by people who left and took their spreadsheet foo with them.
Yeah, this never happens with a proprietary codebase!
Who needs historical knowledge when you can just rewrite the program every few years in a different environment with all new bugs? (and a smattering of the old ones, too)
Few work things have bemused me more in the last couple of years than watching someone re-implement a slow SQL process in an HDFS big data platform forgetting all of the things that went wrong the first time, fixing them again, and then running into weeks worth of new bugs just to get not time critical data faster.
Yeah, this never happens with a proprietary codebase!