Posted by aamederen 19 hours ago
It can even happen that the tag "very smart" gets attached to those sidelined engineers. That's not necessarily a compliment.
I don't think this phenomenon is unique to programming. My plumber was explaining how he put in a manifold and centralized whole-house off valve accessible indoors and I was like, okay, thanks? I can just turn it off at the street.
Only established professionals have the status and self-confidence to show restraint. I think that explains interviews.
We have a calendar reminder to exercise the valves in our house yearly, and the fact that they’re easy to get at helps make sure it’s a quick job, not a tedious one.
Not a plumber, but have lived in enough old houses with iffy valves to have been bitten a few times.
Adding extra things can always help, specially like in the UI side of things, since higher ups will probably just notice that part.
Take these two alternatives:
class UserService {
PostgresDatabase db;
}
class UserService {
IDatabase db;
}
There are some coworkers who will veto the second example for being too complex, because Postgres is all you use for now, and if you really need to use a second database, you can change the code then (YAGNI). Also the Interface gives you a pointless indirection that breaks IntelliSense so you can't just 'click-through' to follow the code flow.
I heard something that helps better framing those discussions, use "familiar" instead of "simple".
An highly abstract way to access a database table, with ORM for example, can be simple because everyone is expecting it and knows how to do all tasks (changing schema, troubleshooting, managing transactions, etc.).
Doing userService.pgSql("select ....") in the same way can be simple.
I on the other hand spent 3 weeks optimizing our core service and reduced 2x the opex costs of the large complex 3 year migration.
In my yearly review my manager acknowledged my impact, but said I need to solve more complex problems to get to Staff Engineer. I protested saying that my 3 weeks of work had a larger impact than 20 engineers over 3 years, but he told me that is just how it works.
The real question is how do you tell engineer A who can figure out how to make the complex problems simple from engineer C who can't handle complexity and so writes simple solutions when the complex one is needed.
Of course, if it's the person in charge introducing said overengineering there is a problem.
Worse, to suggest a simpler approach checking existing products/APIs or even preparing toy prototype is required to be confident in own advice. This hidden work is left entirely unnoticed even by well meaning managers/engineers: they simply don't know if you knew or had to discover simpler solution.
In my (limited) experience as an engineer and manager, leadership (e.g., a VP) didn’t like (or reward) simplicity. Simple solutions often meant smaller teams, which wasn’t something they were pushing for, especially pre-2024. I do think this is slowly evolving, and that the best leaders now focus on removing unnecessary complexity and improving velocity.
The obvious outcome will be that the most skilled pretenders optimizing for their selfish profit narrow view, no matter what the consequences will be for the collectivity on large scale and at long terms.