[TechyLuddite]

I've noticed quite often very competent junior devs are very often guilty of writing far to complex code. I think there's often a disconnect between the ideal of what software should be and what best solves the problem.

Since taking the mindset of been required to solve a problem as opposed to trying to write the 'best' and 'cleanest' software I've found my productivity jump substantially while ending up with easier to maintain code.

[joshstrange]

One of the most frustrating things I’ve dealt with is a junior developer (who, based on years in the industry, thought they were a senior) who would write clever/complex code just for the sake of it. That and touching 10+ things in their commits that were outside the scope of the ticket (“cleaning up other code”).

I’ll fully admit I used to be that person but some people never seem to grow out of it. They see what they perceive as “gross” code, repetitive code, or verbose code and make it their mission to DRY it out or rewrite it in a shorter, more clever way. Cleverness in code should be avoided at almost all costs, code golfing might be a fun exercise but has no business in real codebases, and trying to abstract and centralize logic with only 1-2 implementations is foolhardy at best.

I’ll take verbose, understandable code every day over code that I have to stop and think about for any amount of time.

[Kailhus]

Junior dev here, I’ll bite. I’m not sure of the specifics but I sincerely hope we don’t work together and you actually raised this with them as this fills me with zero confidence in my work, we all have different views on what’s “going too far” regardless of level and as others have said it’s rather difficult to know without being told.

Yes, if it’s in my logic path, I will replace an old regex in favour for a newer in-built function that is much easier to read and I’m certain does the same thing, rename a constant which make zero sense or split the same damn check repeated 10x times into it’s own better named constant or helper function - as long as it doesn’t touch the business logic, who cares! But, I do think it’s important to check the temp with your lead and clear this is an acceptable thing to “tidy up” behind you.

[pavel_lishin]

> That and touching 10+ things in their commits that were outside the scope of the ticket (“cleaning up other code”).

The smartest thing I do every day when I touch old code is turn off auto-formatting in my editor, studiously avoid doing minor clean-ups ("why the FUCK is this line 300 characters long"), and touch only what I'm working on.

Instead, I'll make a note to come back and clean up the other stuff later, if I have time, in a whole separate branch/commit/ticket. And then that note probably gets deleted, because this code is 8 years old, and is slated to be rewritten, almost certainly before I would get around to doing the minor chore clean-up.

It's not like the kitchen - there's no reason to quickly wipe up the stove during the 2 minutes that the microwave is doing its thing. It won't rot and stink up the place any more than it is now.

[wutwutwat]

> junior devs write far too complex code

…

> I think there's often a disconnect

Maybe you were already saying this, but learning how to write just enough of the least complex code is a skill acquired through experience, which naturally junior developers don’t yet have. It’s the pain of maintaining over engineering and needlessly complex code and attacking tech debt that develops the skills to avoid such things in the future. No better teacher for those things :)