I'd hope any reasonable senior programmer has hit enough landmines to understand why such a fence is necessary. Especially for legacy code. Doesn't matter how

I'd hope any reasonable senior programmer has hit enough landmines to understand why such a fence is necessary. Especially for legacy code. Doesn't matter how well you trace the behavior, you will hit some random quirk in your refactor because of some incocuous hotfix done over a decadde ago by an employee who no longer works there somehow keeping the entire repository from crashing in on itself. If you're lucky, there will be a: //todo fix this (10/10/2013) somewhere as a hint ;)