There is a thing that happens when you join a new codebase. You open a file, read maybe fifteen lines, and then you close it. Not because you understood it. Because you stopped wanting to understand it.
I think about this a lot. We talk about clean code, readable code, well-documented code, as if the problem is always on the writing side. But the reading side has its own psychology and almost nobody talks about it honestly.
Reading someone else's code is uncomfortable in a way that is hard to name. It is not just that the logic is unfamiliar. It is that you are stepping inside someone else's head. Their assumptions are baked into every variable name. Their shortcuts make sense only if you know what they were rushing toward. Their weird choice of a for loop where a while loop would feel more natural is probably the result of a bug they fixed at 11pm six months ago and never bothered to refactor. You are not reading code. You are reading a person.
And most of us are not trained for that. We are trained to write, to produce, to ship. Reading feels passive. Reading someone else's bad code feels like losing. Reading someone else's good code feels even worse because then you have to sit with the fact that you would not have done it that way and you are not sure if your way is actually better.
