We had a perl "guru" who wrote a number of management scripts for servers. They were located in inconsistent locations and were completely inscrutable because o

We had a perl "guru" who wrote a number of management scripts for servers. They were located in inconsistent locations and were completely inscrutable because obfuscated in a manner that I think he thought was clever. Seriously, I don't think his code was obfuscated because he was malicious, incompetent, or "making himself too indispensable to fire." I think he thought writing tight compact perl code that was unreadable by anyone else was an imperative to being a good perl coder. I think it was like his philosophy of coding or something. I mean his documentation that he wrote for how to do stuff around the network was fantastic insightful and robust. But his fucking code was just awful. I basically had to run every perl script we could find though the debugger to understand what it was doing and rewrite it from scratch so it could be maintained in the future. These days I'm an actual software developer and when I write code I think of this dudes perl code whenever I write code and I think it has made me a better developer because I strive for maintainability and readability over almost everything else. Mainly because I feel like reading his code and rewriting it was akin to psychological torture and I nearly quit my job several times in the process.