Comment by catlifeonmars

As with all software engineering, it’s all about trade offs and context.

That performant code that you wrote maybe at the expense of readability? It could very well become bad code when you leave the company and it falls to a junior engineer to modify it to fit some changing business requirement. Or, there’s a bug in the code and the amount of time it takes to fix it is a direct function of how quickly and completely that junior engineer can understand the code.

For me, the hard part is knowing when and how to make that trade off. I’ve definitely erred on both sides often enough.