[asdfman123]

I feel like a lot of frustration towards technical debt is rooted in projection. The code confuses you, and you feel dumb, but instead of accepting your feelings you blame the guy who wrote it and assume they're dumb.

However, often people have good reasons for why they write the code they write. For instance, maybe there are so many quirks and edge cases there's no way to write clean code without creating a massive body of abstractions that would just making development speed slower.

I'm all about clean code but as a senior developer I increasingly realize that naturally, everything is a tradeoff. While you should be biased towards neatness, sometimes writing pristine code just isn't worth the time or cost of maintaining all those abstractions.

[mekane8]

Well said. And to be fair, I was talking mostly tongue-in-cheek about the "idiot", etc. I've been that guy I'm sure.

I agree about the trade-offs, I've been there myself too.