Exactly. Code should be self-explanatory, and anything fancy should be clearly commented.
The difference between a good and great software engineer is understanding the cost of fancy code, and when it’s worth it to pay that cost. A great software engineer practices restraint, preferring code that even the most junior of engineers can maintain. Solutions should be extensible without serious refactors, and should attain good performance through good high-level design instead of low-level optimizations.
I’m guessing the “rockstar” OP is talking about went deep into the weeds of metaprogramming and even they can’t explain how it works a few weeks later. We have that crap here too, and nobody likes it, especially the seniors, but it’s so ingrained in the code that nobody wants to risk introducing bugs by fixing it.
Exactly. Code should be self-explanatory, and anything fancy should be clearly commented.
The difference between a good and great software engineer is understanding the cost of fancy code, and when it’s worth it to pay that cost. A great software engineer practices restraint, preferring code that even the most junior of engineers can maintain. Solutions should be extensible without serious refactors, and should attain good performance through good high-level design instead of low-level optimizations.
I’m guessing the “rockstar” OP is talking about went deep into the weeds of metaprogramming and even they can’t explain how it works a few weeks later. We have that crap here too, and nobody likes it, especially the seniors, but it’s so ingrained in the code that nobody wants to risk introducing bugs by fixing it.
Hell, not even junior devs. I need to be able to come back to code months or years later and be able to figure it out. I can only remember so much.