Cognitive load is what matters

The ability to create code that imposes low cognitive load on others not only is a rare and difficult skill to cultivate- it takes active effort and persistence to do even for someone who already has the ability and motivation. I think fundamentally the developer is computing a mental compression of the core ideas - distilling them to their essence - and then making sure that the code exposes only the minimum essential complexity of those ideas. not easy and rare to see in practice

And if you do it really well, people think it must have been such an easy problem to solve all along. Since everything always appears so obvious in insight.

While the castle of cards of unfathomable complexity is praised for visibly hard work and celebrated with promotions.

“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all”