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>I deliberately try to make things complex

I see this often with someone who has made it into a senior role and then is attempting to ensure job security through complexity. Reflecting this on to junior developers further reinforces that said developer has adopted (usually subconsciously) a fear-driven approach.

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Job security does not seem like a reasonable explanation for programmer behavior in this day and age.

Yes and no. Some developers really want to stay in the same place working on the same sorts of things and to have control over the domains they are working on. There are usually many reasons for this, some ones are easy to understand such as people who value autonomy in their work over the pure dollar value of salary that could be gained by job-hopping. For some folks, the idea of having to go somewhere new with different practices and where they may not be in charge of making decisions on the codebase (or at least not having any control over what goes into it) is terrifying.

I don't need to write bad code to justify my existence when my existence is justified in the face of other developers writing such bad code.

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