I can offer what much younger me was once told by a senior engineer:
1) With respect to not having whitespace: "Not everyone is as smart as you, and you need to ask yourself, do you want junior engineers working on your code to keep bothering you asking how things work, or would you rather your code by easy to read (and commented) so that they can pick things up on their own?"
2) With respect to complexity: "We are expected to build products that align with business objectives. New and experimental code belongs in your home lab and on your GitHub, not in a production environment."
Depending on how things go with #2, maybe offer to let the engineers spend 20% of their time working on lab projects to improve their product, with the understanding being that the rest of the time they are expected to build products with a minimum of complexity.
1) With respect to not having whitespace: "Not everyone is as smart as you, and you need to ask yourself, do you want junior engineers working on your code to keep bothering you asking how things work, or would you rather your code by easy to read (and commented) so that they can pick things up on their own?"
2) With respect to complexity: "We are expected to build products that align with business objectives. New and experimental code belongs in your home lab and on your GitHub, not in a production environment."
Depending on how things go with #2, maybe offer to let the engineers spend 20% of their time working on lab projects to improve their product, with the understanding being that the rest of the time they are expected to build products with a minimum of complexity.