Code Must Be Clean. And Clear

I have worked projects where the most senior developers barely understood cs 101 data structures and lacked good taste in there own code.

Any time they did not understand they would insist comments were added. Then later would sneak back in and rewrite.

Mind you they would shorten variable names, remove pre condition checks on parameters because the thought it was useless code. Remove helper/util methods/functions and refactor from short methods into long ones Etc...

This was all in the sake of clear code. Clear to whom? Not everyone has the same level of skills or can recognize why code is structured the way it is.

I spent more time teaching than I did anything else because the senior and lead devs were senior by title not senior in skills.

My advice, when you run into a piece of code in a review, and it’s not clear to you. Before you knock it down and comment all over it, this is the moment for you and them to learn.

When you ask why are you using switch cases like that or why are you checking parameters passed in for validly or other safety critical patterns, or don’t understand template, or dependency injection, mixins, runtime type inspection. You may not be qualified to even comment.

So again clear to whom?