[TeMPOraL]

Do you maintain a high-enough level within the team though? Most "clever code" I've seen is called clever by people who are not yet proficient enough in a language to understand it. So with unskilled programmers pretty much anything that isn't straight combination of classes, loops and conditionals will be considered clever. There's a tradeoff here - I get the business reasons why one may want to have the codebase at the "lowest common denominator" level for the team. But then again, programming is a craft, so that person who says lambdas in Java are "clever code" (real example from my work) should IMO suck it up and spend few hours learning; then the code will stop being "clever" to them.

[cloverich]

> Most "clever code" I've seen is called clever by people who are not yet proficient enough in a language to understand it.

My interpretation is the opposite. I call code "clever" after I've understood it. I agree its not universal, but in all the cases I've seen it used so far, its been another way to say "This could have been written in a simpler, more readable manner. And it should have been."

[TheOtherHobbes]

Ockham's Law of Programming: the simplest solution which solves the problem is the best solution.

[slededit]

Not every company wants highly skilled programmers. Depending on the complexity of the project, and cost of defects unskilled programmers may be the most cost effective.

[TeMPOraL]

I know. Took me a while to realize it and understand why companies think that way, but it boils down to the fact that as programmers, we're not paid to do a good job, we're paid to do a good enough job. Those two goals are very often at odds. It seems to be a typical clash of craftsmanship with market economy.

[jbattle]

Another articulation is - we aren't paid to write code, we are paid to build stuff.

Authors get paid to write prose people can read - the readability of our work only 'matters' insofar as good craftsmanship practices help the team maintain velocity over the long haul.

[ern]

That's a good point. There is also a fine line between craftsmanship and intellectual self-gratification at a customer's expense. Doing a good enough job that solves a customer's problems without gold-plating or unneeded complexity is what professionals in most fields are ethically required to do.

As tired as I am of seeing sloppy code, I also intensely dislike the trend at the other end, of creating a half-dozen RESTful microservices and throwing away the relational DB just because it seems cool, maintainability be damned.

I'm hopeful that software development (especially business software development) will someday escapes it perpetual adolescence, and will develop stronger ethical standards.

[mianos]

Unskilled software developers are never cost effective. Never.