Yet, I'm always surprised in how good the official javadoc is at avoiding this problem. They always have a @return and it's usually saying something useful. I

Yet, I'm always surprised in how good the official javadoc is at avoiding this problem. They always have a @return and it's usually saying something useful. I think there's two situations: 1) You're writing javadoc for something that isn't really a public facing api. In that case, I agree, remove the @return. Perhaps even remove that / * * and convert it to / *. It shouldn't be officially documented. 2) It is public facing api. It may seem that the @return is redundant, but there's really a better way to document it.