[Arelius]

> An individual who ended up owning a particular piece of a codebase will be incentivized to obfuscate and obscure their code in order to maintain full control over it.

That's fair, but I've also seen an orthogonal effect happen maybe more often where an engineer structures code just naturally in a way that fits them well, but is poorly understood by others. Not due to the incentives of maintaining control or job security. But simply because the engineer wasn't talented at making good code for other humans, and there were very few incentives to write code good for other people, at least early on in the design.

[anko]

It's also that sometimes they stay on that codebase because they weren't the best engineer, and all the better ones move on to bigger things.

[hyeomans]

Or they were the best and the ones who left were the worst ones. The argument can be made both ways.

[decafninja]

Or they are a junior or expert beginner engineer that thinks good code means checking off as many design patterns as possible. I've seen this a lot.