What happens to code when the company goes under?

I was working on a new web service, first new project since I started two months ago. Took on the back end work as I'm much better there than on the UI. My last full stack job I did a lot more back end work so its what I know the most about. Nothing too difficult about this task, just reading a few different APIs, merging them together into a single API that becomes public. While my team tends to be more Java focused for services, it was suggested to try one in Node. Again something I've done quite a bit.

While writing the service I remembered that in a previous job I had worked on a nice middleware plugin that made the whole routing and validation process much more concise and easier to consume. A pretty useful utility that had a lot of features. Something I became accustom to using and was now wishing I had. We never got around to publishing the plugin because sadly the company went under during the pandemic. So as a nice side project I decided to write it again, bringing the utility back from the dead.

That got me thinking, where was all the code we had written? Most of the teams wrote custom solutions for our clients, web services for handling deals, rebates, referrals and contests for consumer goods. Chances are if you've won something on a soda cap, filed for a rebate with a cell phone company or got something for buying some sporting goods you probably touched some code we wrote. When the company went under I'm sure the clients kept the parts that were theirs or that were still up and running and the rest just got shut off. But my team was working on a new SaaS product that would get us out of constantly doing custom jobs. Green code that had been used a little in the field for beta testing but nothing that would be owned by anyone except our company. The company was owned by a bank who had no interest in what it was we did beyond making them money.

When a company goes under the desks and chairs, white boards and coffee makers all get auctioned off to raise money to pay off whatever debts still exist. But what happens to the code? We had very little documentation, most of it was spread all over Confluence pages and readmes and in people's heads. Starting up all the micro services, in the right order, with the right configuration was something that took me weeks to learn, and that was with a team of developers sitting next to me filling me in when I got stumped. Nothing in it was too complicated but it would take a good while to walk through it all and figure out what every service did. We were micro service heavy with dozens of services all working in harmony to get to our solution.

I just can't image someone would buy a hard drive full of git repos. Two years worth of stories I wrote are just gone. Maybe the drives are sitting somewhere. I'm sure Github has a backup of our private repos still in existence. I wonder how many projects end up in programming purgatory, still existing somewhere in some form but will never be run again. No one will read through the source, no one will build the Docker containers. Unit tests that will never be run again.

$ published: 2022-10-17 21:09 $

-- CC-BY-4.0 jecxjo 2022-10-17

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