[pojzon]

Recently we hired a consultant for our infrastructure. I wrote the code for that infrastructure using best practices I learnt from books, workshops etc.

While some ppl from my team have huge issues understanding it, the consultant read it ONCE and knew everything. He was simply a good dev that had a pleasure working for other big shops that wrote the books I read and lead those workshops I attended to.

So its like always a matter of „Do I hire cheap HR resource or an expert?” question.

Nothing more, nothing less. The issue with writing smart code is that there is not a lot of smart devs. Thats why we always derotate to lowest denominator.

[1270018080]

Are you the good guy in this story? Writing code that no one else can understand unless they've read multiple books to push through the complexity? Do you write in Java by chance?

[pojzon]

Good guy? Depends how you define that. And it would be challenge to write infra code in java..

[baobabKoodaa]

In my opinion, writing code that is so complex it takes an expert to understand it, is undesirable.

[lycopodiopsida]

But where do we draw the line? If someone does not understand the idea behind interfaces or proper exception handling, who is to blame? If you write Java and Streams are the natural solution, but the developer you work with never bothered to look them up, because they are "complex" and "FP-something"?

These are polemic examples, but there is a line where sticking to the lowest common knowledge will hurt your best developers by either sucking the joy out of their work or by forcing write them a lot of boilerplate code. And I've heard of teams, where the whole team would ban features of a new standard of the language, because they've written code for 20 years without them before.

[baobabKoodaa]

> But where do we draw the line?

Well, we can draw the line based on who is going to maintain the code after we are gone. If we know that the organization is only going to hire rockstar ninja experts, then we can make code that is readable for rockstar ninja experts. If we know that the organization is going to hire mediocre developers, then we need to make code that is understandable by mediocre developers. If you think mediocre developers can't understand streams, then don't use streams. (Personally I think your examples of interfaces, exception handling, and streams, are all things that have their time and place, so it would be fine to use them when needed, and just expect that developers after you will know/learn that stuff.)

[908B64B197]

> If we know that the organization is going to hire mediocre developers, then we need to make code that is understandable by mediocre developers.

There's a secret third option: The organization could just hire good devs.