You’ve seen it on every team. Two senior engineers with similar credentials, same years of experience, equally familiar with the stack. But one consistently produces code that makes other developers nod in appreciation—clean abstractions, intuitive interfaces, systems that feel inevitable in their correctness. The other delivers functional solutions that somehow always feel a bit off.
The code works. Tests pass. Tickets close. But it lacks taste.
This isn’t about aesthetics. The engineers who build beautiful systems create code that’s easier to debug, simpler to extend, and cheaper to maintain. Systems that new hires understand faster. Systems that scale more gracefully under pressure. This article explores the taste problem as part of our comprehensive exploration of aesthetics of code and architecture.
The question that keeps you up at night: Can you teach it?
The Recognition Gap
Here’s what makes taste vexing for technical leaders – you know it when you see it, but you struggle to articulate why.
You can point at a beautiful abstraction in the codebase. Maybe it’s how the payments service isolates third-party provider logic, or how the authentication system handles edge cases without special casing. You feel the rightness of it.
But try explaining to a junior engineer exactly what makes it beautiful, and you find yourself reaching for metaphors about symmetry and elegance that sound uncomfortably vague. You might say “look at how this function does exactly one thing” or “see how these abstractions align with the problem domain.” The junior engineer nods, but you’re not sure they see what you see.
This recognition gap creates a management problem. You can’t build code review standards around “make it more elegant.” You can’t write a hiring rubric that says “must have good taste.”
Yet the engineers with taste are your force multipliers. They’re the ones who see through complexity to find simple solutions. They’re the ones who propose refactorings that somehow make five different problems disappear at once. They’re the ones whose code you trust without needing to review every line.
The Three Dimensions of Engineering Taste
After years of observing what separates developers who build beautiful systems from those who don’t, patterns emerge. Taste operates across three dimensions: structural intuition, contextual awareness, and constraint appreciation.
Structural Intuition
Developers with strong structural intuition see patterns that others miss. They recognise that the current authentication problem is structurally identical to the caching problem they solved last quarter—both involve invalidation strategies and state synchronisation. Pattern recognition as aesthetic skill manifests across different areas—from monitoring to system design to code structure—and developing this intuition is central to cultivating taste.
Consider how Salvatore Sanfilippo designed Redis. The entire system is built on one structural insight: if you keep everything in memory and make the primary threading model single-threaded, you eliminate entire categories of complexity. No locks, no race conditions, no complex synchronisation. The constraints that seem limiting actually simplify the entire architecture into something beautiful.
Developers with taste create module boundaries that feel natural because they align with the actual forces acting on the system. When business requirements change, their abstractions bend instead of breaking. They weren’t predicting the future—they were seeing the structure clearly enough to know where flexibility would matter.
You can spot structural intuition during architecture discussions. It’s the engineer who draws the diagram that makes everyone else say “oh, of course” because suddenly the solution seems obvious.
Contextual Awareness
Great taste requires understanding not just what the code does, but where it lives.
The right abstraction in a startup racing to product-market fit looks different from the right abstraction in financial infrastructure that will run for the next decade. Beautiful code isn’t just correct—it’s readable by the specific humans who will maintain it.
Rich Hickey’s Clojure achieves elegance partly through its minimal core, but that elegance has a cost: new developers face a steep learning curve. Whether that’s beautiful or problematic depends entirely on your team and your timeframe.
The best engineers adjust their taste to context. They write different code for the rapid prototype that might get thrown away than for the payment processing core that must never fail.
Context awareness prevents the most common taste failure: building cathedrals when you need tents. The senior engineer who spends three weeks creating a perfect, generic, reusable abstraction for a problem you might encounter once has taste, but they’re applying it without context.
Constraint Appreciation
Here’s a paradox: the engineers who build the most beautiful systems aren’t the ones with unlimited freedom. They’re the ones who embrace constraints creatively.
Look at the Unix pipe. The constraint—each programme does one thing and communicates via text streams—seemed limiting. But that limitation enabled a compositional elegance that still powers systems fifty years later.
Engineers with poor taste often respond to constraints by fighting them or working around them. Engineers with good taste see constraints as design information. If the framework makes something difficult, maybe that thing shouldn’t be easy. Judging good constraints from bad is a crucial aspect of developing taste for simplicity—recognising which limitations inspire elegant solutions and which genuinely impede progress.
D. Richard Hipp built SQLite under the extreme constraint that it must be a single file with zero configuration. That constraint didn’t limit the design—it focused it into something uniquely valuable.
When you’re evaluating taste, watch how engineers respond to limitations. Do they immediately reach for workarounds, or do they first ask whether the constraint might be showing them a better path? Architectural judgment and negative space—deciding what not to build—is where taste becomes most visible in system design decisions.
The Development Path
Is taste something you’re born with or something you can develop?
The answer matters for how you build your team. If taste is innate talent, you’re stuck with a pure hiring problem. But if taste can be learned, you have options. You can invest in cultivation. You can create environments where taste develops naturally.
The evidence suggests taste is largely learned. But the learning process is neither quick nor straightforward.
The Ten Thousand Hours Problem
You can’t develop taste without exposure.
An engineer who has only ever worked on CRUD applications in a monolithic Rails app hasn’t seen enough to develop refined structural intuition. They might write perfectly clean Rails code, but they lack the reference points to recognise when Rails itself is the wrong choice.
This creates a bootstrapping problem—they haven’t seen enough beautiful systems to know what they’re aiming for. You can’t send everyone to work at Stripe for two years to absorb their API design philosophy.
But you can create exposure deliberately. The best technical leaders run regular code reading sessions, where the team analyses excellent open source code together. They don’t just discuss what it does—they discuss why it’s structured that way, what constraints shaped it, how the choices interact. Taste recognises mathematical elegance—developing this sense for elegant solutions requires repeated exposure to systems that embody these principles.
Code review becomes more effective when you treat it as taste development, not just bug prevention. Instead of just noting “this abstraction is too complex,” you explain what simpler version you’re envisioning and why it’s better. Documentation excellence requires taste—judging good from great documentation is one of the clearest indicators of developing aesthetic judgment.
The Subtraction Learning Curve
Most engineers expect that developing taste requires learning more techniques. The opposite is true: developing taste means unlearning unnecessary complexity.
Junior engineers add abstractions because abstractions feel powerful and sophisticated. They create layers and indirection and patterns because that’s what “good” architecture looks like in textbooks.
The journey towards taste is learning when NOT to abstract, when NOT to generalise, when NOT to make things configurable.
Donald Knuth’s TeX represents decades of this refinement. The system is complex because typesetting is complex, but there’s barely a wasted concept in the entire architecture. Every abstraction earns its place.
You can accelerate this process by explicitly valuing deletion in code review. Celebrate the pull request that removes code. Ask “could we do this with what we already have?” before approving new abstractions.
The engineers who develop the strongest taste are usually the ones who’ve had to maintain their own systems for years. They’ve felt the pain of their own over-abstraction. They’ve seen how the clever indirection they were so proud of made debugging impossible six months later.
The Apprenticeship Model
The most effective way to develop taste is through apprenticeship.
Junior engineers working closely with senior engineers who have excellent taste absorb it through osmosis. They see decisions being made in real-time. They learn to ask not just “does this work?” but “is this right?”
This is why pair programming and code review are so valuable—not for catching bugs (though they do), but for transmitting taste. When a senior engineer refactors a junior’s code and walks through their reasoning, they’re teaching judgment, not just technique.
You can structure this deliberately. Make sure your engineers with the strongest taste are spending time with those still developing it. Not just in formal mentoring relationships, but in daily collaboration. Have them co-design systems. Have them review each other’s architectural proposals.
Building a Culture of Taste
Individual taste matters, but team taste matters more.
The best engineering organisations develop a shared aesthetic—a collective sense of what good looks like that becomes self-reinforcing.
The Standards Question
You need standards. But the wrong kind of standards kill taste rather than cultivating it.
Rigid style guides that specify every bracket and naming convention create consistency without understanding. Engineers follow the rules because they must, not because the rules embody better thinking. This produces uniform code, but not beautiful code.
Better standards focus on principles rather than specifics. Instead of “functions must be no longer than 20 lines,” try “functions should do one thing at the appropriate level of abstraction.” The second version requires judgment. Diagram quality as taste indicator applies here too—visual communication standards reveal taste as clearly as code quality does.
The best standards emerge from the team rather than being imposed from above. When your engineers collectively decide they want to minimise mocking in tests because it leads to more robust test suites, they understand why. They’ve internalised the taste judgment.
Regular architecture review sessions where the team critiques real proposals—not to find fault, but to refine collective judgment—help develop shared standards. Make it safe to say “this feels wrong” even if you can’t immediately articulate why.
Creating Exposure to Excellence
Your team’s taste ceiling is limited by what they’ve seen. If they’ve only ever worked in your codebase, they can’t develop taste beyond what already exists there.
Deliberately expose your team to excellent systems. Pick an exemplary open source project—maybe SQLite for its documentation craft, or Git for its graph theory elegance—and do a deep reading group. Spend weeks understanding not just what it does but why it’s designed that way. What constraints shaped it? What trade-offs did the creators make?
This isn’t academic. You’re training your team to see quality so they can create it themselves.
The investment pays off when your engineers start naturally reaching for better abstractions because they’ve seen what better looks like.
The Practical Payoff
Taste has concrete impact on your organisation’s effectiveness.
Systems built with taste have fewer bugs. Clean abstractions are easier to test thoroughly. Simple designs have fewer edge cases where unexpected interactions create failures. The correlation between elegance and correctness isn’t mystical—it’s mathematical. Complexity creates exponentially more states to reason about. Simplicity reduces the state space.
Beautiful code onboards new engineers faster. When abstractions align with problem structure, new team members understand the system more quickly. They can hold the architecture in their heads. They make correct changes without needing to ask as many questions.
Maintenance costs plummet. The reason engineers dread working in ugly codebases isn’t aesthetics—it’s that ugly code is hard to change safely. Beautiful code makes changes obvious and safe.
Even recruiting improves. Strong engineers evaluate you as much as you evaluate them. When candidates review your codebase during the interview process, they’re judging whether they want to work in it every day. Beautiful systems attract engineers with taste, creating a virtuous cycle.
Starting Tomorrow
You don’t need to overhaul your engineering culture immediately. Start with these concrete steps:
Add one question to every architecture review: “Could this be simpler?” Not smaller, not more abstracted—simpler. Force the conversation about whether complexity is necessary or accidental.
Pick one exemplary system—internal or open source—and do a deep reading session with your team. Don’t just discuss what it does. Discuss why it’s structured that way, what makes it elegant, what you can learn from its approach.
In your next one-on-one with an engineer who has strong taste, ask them to articulate their decision-making process. How do they know when an abstraction is right? What signals tell them a design is getting too complex? You’re helping them develop vocabulary for teaching others.
Start celebrating deletions. When someone’s PR removes more code than it adds while still solving the problem, make that a win. You’re signalling that subtraction matters.
Reserve 20% of your next sprint for technical improvement that isn’t tied to any feature or bug. Watch what engineers choose and how they approach it. The choices they make tell you what their taste values. Taste determines appropriate philosophy—when to choose minimalism or maximalism—guiding real architectural decisions rather than following dogma.
Taste in engineering isn’t mystical. It’s a learnable skill that compounds over time, making every subsequent decision slightly better, every system slightly more robust, every change slightly less risky.
You can’t afford to ignore it. Your job is to create the conditions where it flourishes. For a broader exploration of how aesthetic judgment shapes all aspects of software development, see our guide on why beautiful systems work better.
Because in the long run, the teams that build beautiful systems are the teams that win.
