"The Parable of the Two Programmers" by Neil W. Rickert is pretty much about this, from the year 1985...

You can though. You can build a simple system that's easy to operate, and just sail it in.

I’ve known some pretty simple managers that got promoted pretty quickly.

One more opinion piece uselessly recommending "simplicity" with no code samples or concrete takeaways.

> It also shows up in design reviews. An engineer proposes a clean, simple approach and gets hit with “shouldn’t we future-proof this?” So they go back and add layers they don’t need yet, abstractions for problems that might never materialize, flexibility for requirements nobody has asked for. Not because the problem demanded it, but because the room expected it.

$100 says the "clean, simple" approach is the one which directly couples the frontend to the backend to the database. Dependencies follow the control flow exactly, so that if you want to test the frontend, you must have the backend running. If you want to test the backend, you must have the database running.

The "abstractions for problems that might never materialize" are your harnesses for running real business logic under unit-test conditions, that is, instantly and deterministically.

If you do the "simple" thing now, and push away pesky "future-proofing" like architecting for testing, then "I will test this" becomes "I will test this later" becomes "You can't test this" becomes "You shouldn't test this."

Charlie Munger once said >>> Show me the incentive, I will show you the outcome

Problem is in big tech -- the incentives are all aligned towards complex stuff

you wanna get promoted - do complex stuff that doesn't make sense. If you get promoted, then it also boosts the performance of your manager.

the only way to escape this nonsense is to work at smaller companies

right now you've people advocating for A.I coded solutions yet never realizing that A.I solutions result in a convoluted mess since A.I never possesses the ART of software engineering i.e knowing what to cut out

If they could read, this would upset managers at Amazon.

Skill issue—in management.

Good leaders perceive workhorse vs showhorse spectrum, critical toil vs needless flash (and vice versa).

It’s hard. Most fail at hard things. The industry in the aggregate will fail at hard things

So you get articles like this.

Complexity is the enemy of success - Tony Robbins.

Sqlite, the one trick interviewers hate!

Well you do get promoted for simplicity if you outperform others, who do things too complicated.

For example, person A implements the simple solution, gets the project done faster while person B over engineers, has seemingly impressive stuff to talk about but at the end of the day doesn't ship.