[suzzer99]

I was planning to post exactly this. Reminds me of that famous anecdote about the guy who was using different branches in the same source control repo for different functions - who everyone said was a genius but no one could figure out how to touch his code.

[tiborsaas]

I have a similar story, a friend of mine had (and still has) a webdev shop and he said he has a slightly autistic programmer who is his best employee and he's a genius, nobody can understand his code.

One day they called me because at 8PM they were still at the office trying to crack a problem. After a short discussion, I suggested to use a (.*) regex to solve it, without seeing the code, that was the best I could do. Another call 30 min later, I suggested the same but on a different level. At the third call I told them that if they need to keep doing that, something is deeply flawed and they should rewrite it. No more calls came :)

I kinda see where this sentiment is coming from and it's really hard to convince people otherwise. People see movies like Rain Man and they see scientists with huge blackboards and they can't understand a thing so it must be a work of a genius.

[watwut]

I think that if you do some bad things and also code somewhat, a lot of people will assume that you are basically genius. It is as if people felt the need to balance and since they said something bad about you, they will overcompensate in coding skills department.

But it is unfair to nice good coders who don't get praised as crazy good, cause they were not assholes to people.