Talk to them about these issues? I think eventually these sorts of people figure out that they have a better time if they use their smarts to understand the pro

Talk to them about these issues? I think eventually these sorts of people figure out that they have a better time if they use their smarts to understand the problems and design things that are as simple as possible. Ideally you could find someone who is later in their career and has made these mistakes already, but I'm not sure you can prevent people from doing silly things until they are personally burned by doing silly things. Taking the caching scheme as an example, even if it's difficult to reject caching in general, I think you could successfully push for the scheme to be simpler and code complexity forced on users of the cache to be smaller (the latter you can probably get down to 0). > In a past role, I got into a debate about code style with the smartest person I've ever worked with. It boiled down to me advocating for more whitespace in his code and him arguing that adding whitespace made the code harder to read. It took a bit, but eventually I came to understand that he is so good at reading code that he just wants it all laid out in front of him as densely as possible. He can effectively run it in his head, as long as he can see it. > That was baffling to me, I walked away thinking that I must be pretty bad at reading code. I use a very consistent style with long variable and function names, I keep my solutions as simple as I can, and I use whitespace generously to provide visual cues about the code's structure. All of this is to minimize the amount of brainpower I needed to understand my code, so I can put that energy toward thinking about the problem itself. Denser code favors people who cultivate expertise. Less dense and more regular code favors people who receive a single ticket to edit a feature they have never seen before. Almost all orgs enforce the latter style. It's worth considering what sort of thing the thing is, and what sort of people will work on it.