Re:It Gathers Cobwebs Till Nobody Left Remembers I (Score 2, Insightful)

Honestly, if you're lucky, several of the lead developers have kept copies of the source of their own (legally or otherwise), and have a decent idea about what is and isn't worth reusing. I've seen this in a few places, both very big and small.

The brightest people I've seen (coders, managers, producers, etc) have "personal scrapbooks" of this sort.

If they're still at the same company, or otherwise have rights to the code, they use or encourage use of the code directly; if they're not, they generally use the practices and ideas to implement it again. New implementations on the same ideas can be even better than old ones.

If you work someplace with some examples of great code or ideas, it's worth prodding the authors until you understand the hows and whys. Often, if you get the reason behind _why_ something was done the way it was done, (re)building it becomes much easier. People generally enjoy explaining if you take an interest at an opportune time. This kind of information can be even more valuable -- and yet less legally/morally questionable -- than taking the code with you.

Better yet, if *you* have coded or helped with a great system, share it. If you can't share the code, share the ideas: lecture at an industry conference, talk to students, write a blog, submit magazine articles, publish a book, or whatever you can get away with; even company-internal workshops. You'll get far more information than you give, almost guaranteed. It's rewarding on several levels.

All that having been said, some of these things really do work out for the best; some of the code that was lost deserves to undergo a death/rebirth (it would stagnate and never improve otherwise), and some rare pieces should be utterly forgotten (too complex or useless to even present an effective antipattern -- the stuff of nightmares).