> I need to be able to support what I ship and answer to the details of what it does and why it does it. I can only truly do that if I write it myself.

How do you function on a team, where you have to maintain code others have written?

We talk to each other. If someone wrote something I don't understand, I defer to them. If someone wrote something who is no longer with the company, we trying to make sense of it, and in some cases end up re-writing some things.

There are only 3 or 4 of us working on most of the code I touch. 3 of us have worked together in some form or another for close to 20 years.