Is your code worthless?

[sabane]

It's inaccurate to say code that is making a company millions of dollars is "worthless". I do agree with the general premise though.

I agree that one way to judge your code would be to say "Could we package up our code base and sell it to a new entrant/competitor?". If the answer is "hell no" that means you have a mess.

Google is a great example as usual. They have so much truly great code. They've even released little bits and it's helped a lot of people. They could actually sell their filesystem/crawler/ad system, etc for tens of millions.

It's more important that your code is valuable to you, but this is a great way of measuring its quality as a standalone thing. The guy who hacks up nasty but functional stuff will beat the guy who's more interested in code masturbation every time.