"Programmer 15 puts his mod ON THE WRONG SIDE of your early exit because he never saw it. He doesn't do regression testing, and the data base gets screwed up ov

"Programmer 15 puts his mod ON THE WRONG SIDE of your early exit because he never saw it. He doesn't do regression testing, and the data base gets screwed up over the next 6 months." I can certainly see how this is true in a large organization which hires lots of mediocre programmers. However, if you're in a company where the other programmers are top notch, this sort of thing is not a problem. In fact, if I ever see nested ifs and such in a function where I work, it gets changed to the least number of lines of code possible. I can do this because there is only 1 other programmer here, and I know he's not going to screw it up. I don't know your situation, obviously, but my initial reaction is... "Holy crap man... run!"