[theshrike79]

I always reiterate to junior programmers that you write as clever code as you want.

On your own time.

When you're writing code for work, stuff that other people have to eventually read and understand, you be as boring as possible. Skip all the tricks and make code readable, not cute. Someone might have to understand and fix it at 3 in the morning while everything is on fire.

  > Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

[ErroneousBosh]

I worked with a guy who hated comments. Twice a week or so he'd be "working from home" for some damn reason or another, and he'd spend the day removing all the comments from a massive and tangled PHP codebase. PHP4, at that, to give you a sense of how long ago.

Anyway his argument was "but the code should be obvious! You shouldn't need comments to explain what the code does!"

Yes Robert, but you need comments to explain what the code expects to do stuff to, and why you want that.

Turns out that removing the "Development Manager" as he styled himself's write access to the Subversion repository causes ripples in the fabric of reality right up to the C suite, but I could back my decision up with solid evidence that he was causing more problems than he was solving.