As a senior dev, I wish that I could say I always knew more than my interns, and that all the code that's there is because it was carefully planned to be that w

As a senior dev, I wish that I could say I always knew more than my interns, and that all the code that's there is because it was carefully planned to be that way. But more often than not, I don't, and it's not. My take on it is that for the most part senior devs are a lot more paranoid on breaking things and don't want to make code changes unless enough people are asking for it and it'll make a notable difference. Even making things strictly faster can break users if they depend on the algorithm being slow (an extreme edge case that you'd usually say is the user's fault anyway, but could nonetheless be relevant in things like optimizing away a spin-wait).