There’s a myth in software engineering that clean code means clever code. Early in my career, I spent hours writing the most elegant one-liners, chaining methods, and using every design pattern I’d read about.
Then I joined a team maintaining a 5-year-old codebase serving 2 million users. Everything changed.
<h2>The readable code paradox</h2>
The best codebases I’ve worked on aren’t beautiful — they’re boring. Senior engineers write code that looks almost too simple. No clever tricks. No abstractions for the sake of abstraction. Just straightforward, obvious logic that anyone can understand at 2 AM during an incident.
Here’s what I mean:
Junior approach:
Compress everything into dense, “smart” code. Use reduce where a for-loop works. Abstract prematurely. Name things based on patterns instead of intent.
Senior approach:
Write code that reads like a story. Use explicit variable names even if they’re long. Favor duplication over the wrong abstraction. Leave comments explaining WHY, not what.
<h2>3 principles I now follow</h2>
1. Optimize for deletion, not extension
Every line of code is a liability. The best code is code that’s easy to delete when requirements change — because they always do. Small, decoupled functions with clear boundaries beat a deeply nested inheritance hierarchy every time.
2. Boring technology wins
That shiny new framework? It might be abandoned in 18 months. PostgreSQL, Redis, and a well-structured monolith have carried more startups to scale than any microservice architecture designed in week one.
3. Comments are not a code smell
The “self-documenting code” crowd goes too far. Code tells you WHAT is happening. Comments tell you WHY — the business context, the edge case that caused a bug, the regulatory requirement behind a weird check. Future you will be grateful.
<h2>The real skill</h2>
Writing complex code is easy. Writing simple code that handles complex problems is the actual craft. It takes years to learn when NOT to use a pattern, when NOT to optimize, and when a 20-line function is better than five 4-line functions scattered across three files.
Next time you review a PR and think “this looks too simple” — that might be exactly what good engineering looks like.
What’s a coding principle you had to unlearn? I’d love to hear your experience.

sirajju

Senior developers often write code that looks deceptively simple, prioritizing readability and maintainability over cleverness. Three core principles emerge from experience: optimize code for easy deletion rather than extension, favor proven boring technology over trendy frameworks, and use comments to explain the 'why' behind decisions rather than the 'what'. The real craft of engineering is knowing when NOT to apply patterns or optimizations, and recognizing that a straightforward 20-line function can be better than fragmented abstractions. Writing simple code that handles complex problems is harder than writing complex code.

Why Senior Developers Write "Ugly" Code — And Why You Should Too

This resonates hard. I spent years chasing “clean architecture” patterns before realizing the cleanest architecture is the one your whole team can reason about in 5 minutes. Boring is a feature, not a bug.