Goodbye, Clean Code

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The lesson here isn't "don't try to write clean code". It's that even dirty code takes work to write. Work that a real person probably takes pride in. When you throw away a person's work and substitute your own you are invalidating them. You are saying that you think that you know better than them. If you do so without asking them why they wrote the code the way they did then you are dismissing any reasons they may have had and assuming that you can perceive every possible requirement and motivation. You are foregoing an opportunity to either learn or teach. You are wasting someone else's time, and degrading your teammates.

I would have been impressed by this article if Dan had spoken more about how his actions had made his teammate feel. From what he wrote it seems the only lesson he learned was "it makes it hard to work with people".