In the kinds of jobs I've gotten, I spend more time reading code than writing code. As such long variable names are very helpful as I have less information I need to commit into my mental working memory.
Even when reading code you wrote yourself, long variable names can be immensely helpful.
I was working on some code today which I wrote a couple of months ago and came across some fields in a struct I had made, two of the fields were named like something_d_foo and something_d_bar (with something, foo and bar being strings which I've replaced in this comment). These names describe a relationship of something to foo and bar. When I read the name I had given it, I thought these were the somethings DISCONNECTED from their foos and bars but a comment I had written beside each of them informed me that they were the DEFAULT somethings of the foos and bars. I promptly renamed the fields as something_default_foo and something_default_bar.
