Your engineering manager is on to something. I feel like that romantic desire, ironically, gets in the way of making real progress 99% of the time; even the code I'm really proud of, given enough time, will probably end up irrelevant, if only because I'll have learned so much more in all that time. It's easy to think of the act of writing as the hardest part of "writing code." But, really, it's all the learning in all the years prior that's most difficult. So, really, "throwing away" code and starting over isn't actually all that costly. Throwing away engineers, their experience, or skills is what gets expensive.

With that said, one of these days I'll start writing my "The Art of Computer Programming" ...

> Also remember that the honeybee is not native to North America and is technically an invasive species here.

Yes, but they are also the only species (so far) that is commercially managed, and therefore easily counted and tracked. If Apis Mellifera is suffering, we can pretty safely assume that other, native species are also suffering.

Maybe I'm over-stating the value, but it's good to remember that, as software and automation becomes more ubiquitous, good standards and good engineering are going to get more and more important.

This says nothing of the, arguably more important, wild bee population, e.g. bumble bees (genus Bombus) ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_honey_bee#Claims_of_hu...