I'm not sure I agree wit this, if I have work that needs to be done, and have a vague idea how long it should take

The engineer that consistently quotes 3x my expectation (and ends up taking 4x with bugs) is going to look way worse than the engineer that ships things quickly with no drama.

Side note:

> The interviewer is like: “What about scalability? What if you have ten million users?”

This reminded me of how much more fun I find it to work on software that always only has one user, and where scaling problems are related solely to the data and GUI interaction design.

I interviewed at a company that used a simple project to screen candidates. It was implementing a cash register checkout system. The task was soo simple that I couldn't figure out what they were looking for. So I implemented the simplest thing possible. I got the job partially because they were impressed by my utterly simple solution. I helped evaluate other candidates given the exact same problem and it's amazing how some people dialed up the complexity to 11. None of them passed the screening.

The irony of simplicity is that people often talk about it, yet the concept is so complicated that they fail to define it.

Posted just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242765

I imagine Steve Jobs would not have agreed with the statement "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity".

This is true, but since the article mentions interviews. They're a game in itself.

Totally tangent, a startup get promoted to getting funded if the business model is simple. May be opt for a startup.

The implication and manifestation of Dijkstra's observation are routine happening in IT ... God bless info tech.

Promotion Driven Development at its finest. There's no good way to fix this without better teams and less Lord of the Flies style management. Servant leadership helps here, but if your team is adversarial in nature there is no escape. A manager that needs an exciting story to get a feather in their hat will take the story every time over "+20 -8000" commit style developers. Your product will suffer accordingly.

A lot of this boils down to promo system being so systematized. I've never heard of people in any other field min/max their promotions as hard along with all of the expert jargon in any other field I've worked in. Packets, peers, comp, other co comps, what your boss thinks of you, what your boss thinks of your peers (nee: competitors), and the inevitable crash out when they don't get the promotion. All part of the bigco experience! I feel like when we systematized comp into ranks Lx, Ly we gave up our leverage a little bit.