Generic methods to find the maximal element in part of a list
I'd just say to go with your implementation; just because it is easier to read! Also, you only .get() from the list once, whereas the proposed solution does it twice.

Shorter is not a synonym for better!

However, the generics are not good; you should at least use &lt;T extends Comparable&lt;? super T&gt;&gt;. Not sure why the proposed solution uses Object as a lower bound...