I’m with you. Sometimes it really just feels like we’re just tacking on the cognitive load of managing the drunk senior in addition to the problem of hand instead of just dealing with the problem at hand.
A hundred times more time is spent reading a given piece of code, than it took writing it, in the lifetime of that program.
OK I made up the statistic, but the core idea is true, and it's something that is rarely considered in this debate. At least with code you wrote, you can probably recognize it later when you need to maintain it or just figure out what it does.
In the olden days I read the code I wrote probably 2-3 times while in the process of reading it, and then almost always once in full just before submitting it.
