Yeah, I feel like jobs that don't require you to reverse engineer a bunch of stuff are the exception, not the inverse.
Hall, I do greenfield embedded programming. Most of the code I touch is completely new; the entire codebase has been replaced and rewritten by me over the last three years. Not one other developer has contributed any significant amount of code. Even then, in this scenario, I'm still reverse engineering some arcane undocumented code at least once a week. Nobody ever documents their libraries properly so I have to rip everything apart to see how it works. Or I need to adapt some vendor example code or a GitHub repo into a slightly different form. Even just existing in the ESP-IDF environment I have to dig into the core code to figure out what the hell it's doing and where these error messages come from.
If you can't read someone else's Gordian knot of undocumented code, I'd argue you are probably not very good at writing code. Reading bad code is a vital part of learning to write good code, and is generally just a fundamental core skill that every programmer needs to have.
If I encounter third party code that is terminally broken, I don’t really care how readable it is, except insofar as I can probably tell it’s terminally broken faster if it’s more readable.
Hall, I do greenfield embedded programming. Most of the code I touch is completely new; the entire codebase has been replaced and rewritten by me over the last three years. Not one other developer has contributed any significant amount of code. Even then, in this scenario, I'm still reverse engineering some arcane undocumented code at least once a week. Nobody ever documents their libraries properly so I have to rip everything apart to see how it works. Or I need to adapt some vendor example code or a GitHub repo into a slightly different form. Even just existing in the ESP-IDF environment I have to dig into the core code to figure out what the hell it's doing and where these error messages come from.
If you can't read someone else's Gordian knot of undocumented code, I'd argue you are probably not very good at writing code. Reading bad code is a vital part of learning to write good code, and is generally just a fundamental core skill that every programmer needs to have.