As a coder the best compliment I've ever gotten was from a consultant. It was basically something like, "Hey, you're the [my initials] that wrote a big chunk of [system]? I can really tell the parts you wrote from the rest, it's so much easier to follow and understand." I had written the original code for that project solo and then it was passed on to another team for maintenance. That, to me, is the best thing a fellow coder can say, that my code was easy for them to maintain.

Conversely, I've seen code written in Java where instead of using objects the original coders used hashmaps with key/value pairs for fields. Sometimes they used some public static strings or an enumeration for the keys but often times they're just randomly hard coded throughout the program with string literals for field keys.

In another system I've worked on the coders did not understand objects/collections at all. So rather than having an array of type Person you had the Persons object that looked like this:

Persons { String[] first_name; String[] last_name; String[] address; }

While it's true that good vs bad code is somewhat subjective... code like the examples I provided above is pretty horrible by the standards of all but the worst coders.