Wow, there's a $300B untapped market for developers who write perfectly maintainable code on the first try and produce no tech debt?
Yes, just like anything there is inefficiency, waste and even some corruption but that is the case even for building bridges or laying 3 lane roads.
Maintenance is actually the most non-trivial part of any software esp. successful one and to discount it reflects the lack of sophistry on part of the actors who reside in C-suites.
I mean, if you did say that, you'd have a point. It would be smaller than claimed, but there really was an untapped market opportunity.
You can go to Amazon right now and buy cheap ebooks from self-published authors who obviously haven't had any editing done. The quality of writing in these is so poor that I've stopped being willing to buy self-published books, but the books do make sales. Completely eliminating the overhead costs of editing (because you don't do it) and publishing (because that's now cheap enough to be free) has opened up a market for low-price, low-quality stories.
Which is the entire point. Unlike books, software systems must continue to function and grow for years. You read a bad book and you toss it aside. You can sell bad software (which will never be fixed), but there's not really a market for it.
Not refactoring is like being a file clerk who saves time by never putting anything back.
Sarcasm aside, there is a difference made between bad code and (regular) refactoring and tech debt in the report. I read bad code as the mistakes a junior might make but any reasonable experienced engineer shouldn't anymore.
That being said, most software today is written without the benefit of quality code analysis or regular linting. There's likely a distribution problem to be solved as well.
If $300B is burned to maintain and refactor new code, that's $300B of value to capture with better tools, infrastructure, and theory. Now, if that were actually to happen, there would be an even larger sum of money burned to maintain and refactor new code, because we just all got $300B more efficient and that means more effort is spent applying software to new fields, industries, and markets which will in turn require brand new code to go through the wringer again.
Any reference or data to back up this assertion? My intuition would say otherwise, if for no other reason than that because the many layers of abstraction that exist today allow a person to become productive writing code with significantly less knowledge and in a shorter time than in the past. When you combine this with a general shortage of workers in the industry, you have a huge influx of individuals less educated in the field and with less experience. With all that considered, I find it hard to think that we're any better at writing software, in fact, the abstractions that exist today are all about letting us be worse at writing code while still being productive.
This is far too broad.
We have better tools (compilers, static analysis, linters, etc.) to find some of the errors we make earlier in the lifecycle. These provide the ability to rapidly address categories of error that were once avoided primarily by an arduous and slow process of scrutinizing hand-written programs. Coupled with more abstract programming languages and computing resources, what we have today is the ability for single developers to write incredibly complex software quickly--with bugs that have a complexity that increases non-linearly.
Sadly, never managed to get the company or anyone to publish the fix. Last I checked, the bug was still present, it's survived at least one full redesign/rewriting. The losses are well over a billion dollars by now. :D
I actually expected a real potential market, silly me.