My interpretation is that most of this disagreement is just from ambiguity left by the parent's brevity. Experience certainly shines bright in architectural an

My interpretation is that most of this disagreement is just from ambiguity left by the parent's brevity. Experience certainly shines bright in architectural and design decisions. I think the parent's point is that no one's code should be considered sacrosanct; all of us can make mistakes, and all of us, even the senior guys, will end up writing some ugly hacks just to get something out the door on time. More junior programmers should not be afraid to make a pass at improving something, nor should they try to emulate their peers' styles or behaviors without thinking about and processing them, lest they internalize bad habits. If a junior dev notices an error, they should point it out, instead of assuming the senior developer's code is beyond reproach. They should understand that once they get added to the resident Wizard's project, they're still going to have to deal with the reality of a production application, which means shortcuts, impurities, bugs, and mistakes. The principle of Linus's Law depends on developers who are willing to call out mistakes and at least prompt a discussion about the tradeoffs. This doesn't mean that senior developers won't be much better at writing maintainable code on a macro level. This is especially true because I've found it usually takes until upper-mid-level for developers to really get an appreciation for simplicity and avoidance of technical debt, and to register that you're actually better if you can do more with less. (n.b.: speeding up a computer program is just making it do less)