Dirty tricks are almost never worth the long term technical debt they represent when either (1) weird bugs start showing up or (2) the original author leaves th

Dirty tricks are almost never worth the long term technical debt they represent when either (1) weird bugs start showing up or (2) the original author leaves the company. I used to believe that there were times when dirty tricks were the right call in certain cases. The problem was that the long term view always proved me wrong: a more verbose but commonly understood approach is much more maintainable than a concise dirty trick, even with ample commenting and documentation.