In defense of not understanding your codebase

As a software engineer, how well do you have to understand your own codebase? My guess is that people who work on small codebases with low-turnover teams (say, Redis or games like The Witness) would say “obviously you have to understand it completely, otherwise you can’t do good work”. I’d also guess that people who work on large codebases with high-turnover teams (say, the Google web search backend or GitHub) would say “obviously you can’t understand it completely, you just have to do the best you can in your local area”. These are two largely different ways of programming with different methods, practices and cultures1. However, the first group is over-represented in online discussion about software engineering2. I want to defend the second group against the first. In many software engineering environments, there’s nothing wrong with being in a state of partial understanding. In fact, in large systems a partial understanding is the best you can do. Against “programming as theory…