> At some point I worked on a Python product written by a person with some good business knowledge, but essentially not a trained developer. They handled our te

> At some point I worked on a Python product written by a person with some good business knowledge, but essentially not a trained developer. They handled our team a bunch of cron-scheduled Python scripts that somehow implemented a complex data processing pipeline and our job was to maintain those. I remember my horror of looking at the code which had zero abstractions and essentially written as a bunch of linear scripts with copy-pasted bits of logic all over the place. Of course, our team has decided to bring some order to that. We have rigorously created abstractions for individual business logic workflows, implementations of those abstractions, factories to instantiate them, and more, and even more on top of that. Fast-forward a couple of months, I wasn’t working on a product for some time and then came back on the team. I looked at the code and I came to realization: the older version better. I had no idea what new code did. Instead of linear logic I had to jump between interfaces, their implementations and a bunch of other abstractions to gather together a complete understanding of the overall implementation. The voice of an experienced developer in my head said: “chosen poorly abstractions are here”. But another one annoyingly replied: “what does it mean to be a poorly chosen abstraction?”. Unfortunately this is a very commonly observed difference between "software engineers" and "business people who write code". The latter want to get a job done, while the former are often looking to implement engineering doctrine that may not be relevant to the problem at hand.