I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build.

I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was.

So now you get Engineer B's output even faster, with even more impressive-sounding abstractions, and the promotion packet writes itself in minutes too. Meanwhile the actual cost - debugging, onboarding, incident response at 3am - stays exactly the same or gets worse, because now nobody fully understands what was generated.

The real test for simplicity has always been: can the next person who touches this code understand it without asking you? AI-generated complexity fails that test spectacularly.

In many ways, the Door Desk award was for simplicity. I remember, one time, someone got an award for getting rid of some dumb operations room with some big unused LCD TVs. When you won these awards, you rarely got any kind of reward. It was just acknowledgement at the meeting. But that time, they literally gave the guy the TVs.

"Reduced incidents by 80%", "Decreased costs by 40%", "Increased performance by 33% while decreasing server footprint by 25%"

Simplicity for its own sake is not valued. The results of simplicity are highly valued.

I guess it may be important to underscore the value that simplicity provides over needless complexity or to sell people on the value of problems prevented rather than preventable catastrophes that were dealt with

Maybe we could encourage a culture of patting people on the back for maintaining reliable "boring" systems

Some people also crave "drama" so there might be a way to frame "boring reliability" as some kind of "epic daily maintenance struggle that was successfully navigated"

Instead you talk about how you complete all your tasks and have so much bandwidth remaining compared to all your peers, the beneficial results of simplicity. Being severely under used while demonstrating the ability to do 2x-10x more work than everybody else is what gets you promoted.

In this vein simplicity is like hard work. Nobody gives a shit about hard work either. Actually, if all you have to show is how hard you work you are a liability. Instead its all about how little you work provided and that you accomplish the same, or more, than everybody else.

In fact, simplicity often is the best future-proofing. Complex designs come with maintenance costs, so simple designs are inherently more robust to reorgs, shifted priorities, and team downsizing.

It's not just the most "elaborate system". The same thing happens in so many other ways. For example a good/simple solution is one and done. Whereas a complex one will be an interminable cause of indirect issued down the road. With the second engineer being the one fixing them.

Then there's another pattern of the 10x (not the case with all 10x-ers) seeding or asked to "fix" other projects, then moving on to the next, leaving all the debt to the team.

It's really an amazing dynamic that can be studied from a game theoretical perspective. It's perhaps one of the adjacent behaviors that support the Gervais principle.

It's also likely going to be over soon, now that AI is normalizing a lot of this work.

As a consultant/contractor I always evangelise simplification and modelling problems from first principles. I jump between companies every 6-12 months, cleaning up after years of complexity-driven development, or outright designing robust systems that anybody (not just the author) can maintain and extend.

This level of honesty helps you build a reputation. I am never short for work. I also bill more than I could ever as a full-time engineer based in Europe.

I built a showback model at a prior org. Re-used shelfware for the POC, did the research on granular costs for storage, compute, real estate, electricity, HVAC maintenance, hardware amortization, the whole deal. Could tell you down to the penny how much a given estate cost on-prem.

Simple. Elegant. $0 in spend to get running in production, modest spend to expand into public cloud (licensing, mainly). Went absolutely nowhere.

Got RIFed. On the way out the door, I hear a whole-ass team did the same thing, using additional budget, with lower confidence results. The biggest difference of all? My model gave you the actual cost in local currency, theirs gave you an imagined score.

The complexity (cost of a team, unnecessary scoring) was rewarded, not the simplicity.

At core, complexity is derived from discovery of demand within those pesky complex humans.

Simplicity is the mechanism of finding common pathways within the mess of complexity of a product.

the tragedy is that simplicity is very expensive and beyond most organizations ability to support (especially since it can slow down demand discovery), and this is one of the allures of big tech for me. I was greatly rewarded and promoted for achieving simplicity within infrastructure.

More than once I have seen the same project yield two separate promotions, for creating it and deleting it. In particular this happens when the timescale of projects is longer than a single engineer's tenure on a given team.

But yes, avoiding complexity is rarely rewarded. The only way in which it helps you get promoted is that each simple thing takes less time and breaks less often, so you actually get more done.

Most of my engagements consisted of replacing politics-driven complications with simple solutions.

The bigger problem was first quietly showing all the affected people other interesting things that needed doing so they would let go.

And TBH, the simple stuff lasted the longest because it harder to misunderstand or misrepresent.

Software dev's tendency to build castles is great for technical managers who want to own complex systems to gain organizational leverage. Worse is better in this context. Even when it makes people who understand cringe.

You would think that things not breaking should be career-positive for SysAdmins, SREs, and DevOps engineers in a way it cannot be for software devs. But even there simplicity is hard and not really rewarded.

Unix philosophy got this right 50 years ago — small tools, composability, do one thing well. Unix reimagined for AI is my attempt to change that.

It's often simpler to build something you know than to integrate a 3rd party service, but it's highly frowned upon by a lot of devs and management.

Auth and analytics are things I'm thinking of - we have good tools to build these in-house. Also just running a database - never seen so many people afraid of installing postgres and a cronjob to back it up.

I'm currently building a full-blown OpenAPI toolchain at work, where the OpenAPI document itself is the AST. It contains passes for reference inlining, document merging, JSON Schema validation, C++ code generation and has further plans for data model bindings, HTML5 UI...

Why? Because I'm working on a new embedded system which has a data model so complex, it blew past 10k lines of OpenAPI specifications with no end in sight. I said "ain't no way we're implementing this by hand" and embarked on the mother of all yak shavings.

I want all of the boilerplate/glue code derived from a single source of truth: base C++ data classes, data model bindings, configuration management, change notifications, REST API, state replication for device twins and more. That way we can focus on the domain logic instead, which is already plenty complex on its own.

I'm not designing all of this to be simple to develop. I'm designing it so that it's simple for the developers. Even with the incomplete prototype I have currently, the team is already sold ("you mean I just write the REST API specification and it generates all of the C++ classes for me to inherit?"). The roadmap of features for that toolchain is defined, clear and purposeful: to delete mountains of menial, bug-prone source code before it is ever written by hand.

Sometimes, it takes complexity to deliver simplicity. The trick is to nail the abstractions in-between.

Also survivorship bias is a very real thing (problem prevented is ignored, while problem solved is appreciated regardless of who and why caused it).

In the hands of an experienced developer/designer, AI will help them achieve a good result faster.

In the hands of someone inexperienced, out of their depth, AI will just help them create a mess faster, and without the skill to assess what's been generated they may not even know it.

Too often the smallest changeset is, yes, simple, but totally unaware of the surrounding context, breaks expectations and conventions, causes race conditions, etc.

The good bit in tfa is near the end:

> when someone asks “shouldn’t we future-proof this?”, don’t just cave and go add layers. Try: “Here’s what it would take to add that later if we need it, and here’s what it costs us to add it now. I think we wait.” You’re not pushing back, but showing you’ve done your homework. You considered the complexity and chose not to take it on.

[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1305.PDF

The longest lived projects and solutions I've worked on have always been the simplest, easiest to replace solutions. Often derived from simple tests scenarios or solutions that just work and get shifted over without much re-work.

What's somewhat funny, with this is that AI code assistants have actually helped a lot with continuing this approach for me... I can create a stand alone solution to work on a library or component, work through the problems, then copy the component/library into the actual work project it was for. I'm in a really locked down internalized environment, so using AI for component dev is on my own hardware... but the resulting work is a piece that can be brought in as-is. No exposure of internal data/resources.

I don't think I'll have a level of trust to "one-shot" or vibe code solutions from AI, but leveraging the ability to spin up a project as a sample to test a component/library is pretty great to say the least.

In the FAANGs I've worked at, engineers who come from scrappy companies and implement hacks (Like the example of emailing spreadsheets around) undermine the business and will cost the productivity of thousands of people.

However, at the startups I've worked at, the folks from big companies that try to implement a super complex thing (e.g. exotic databases, overly ambitious infrastructure) The results are equally catastrophic for a company attempting to bootstrap when the complexity is so far removed from their core business.

What makes an experienced engineer is recognizing both states, understanding what works where and making the right trade-offs, usually from experience you can't fake your way through. I've seen a lot of projects that took 10-20 engineers 18 months to so we could sell something that landed a $100M contract with a customer. You see that enough times and you won't bias as hard against complexity. But of course it's situation dependent, like anything.

Slightly related: I've noticed that there are lots of "ideas guys" (yes, guys) in our field who love to bloviate, and maybe even accomplish some stuff that looks really good. I have made a career out of just putting my head down and getting shit done. I may not have grand design ideas, and in fact have had to unlearn the "fact" that you need to come up with, and implement, Big Ideas. In my experience, people who "get shit done" may not get fancy awards, but their work is recognized and rewarded.

I had to stop trying to prove myself to the company. I have already done that when y'all interviewed me. Now I do what's best for everyone, and I want the company to prove to me that it deserves people who do the right thing despite the processes not valuing it. If it does not, I have enough resources to spend some time on the projects I cared about most.

This mentality gave me peace of mind and helped many people in partner teams go faster and with higher quality.

Management still does not openly appreciate it, but it shows in how they interact with me. Like when you learn to talk to your parents as equals. It's unexpected for them, but they quickly embrace the new interaction and they love it much more than the one before.

BUT, at least very occasionally I have seen people get promoted for simplicity, I've even successfully made the case myself. With a problem that was itself so complex that it was causing fires on a regular basis, and staff & principal engineers didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. When a senior eng spent a couple of weeks thinking about the problem and eventually figured out a way to reframe it and simplify the solution, melting away months of work, making the promo case was actually quite easy.

The problem is, the opportunities to burn down complexity like that don't present themselves nearly as often as the opportunities to overcomplicate a thing, which are pretty much unbounded.

The sad thing is that it is common to get fired when you make things better bc then your work is perceived as "done" and your skills are no longer necessary. There are countless IT job stories where someone delivers a technical solution that saves a company a ton of money or generates revenue, then they get fired bc the solution has been delivered and an off shore team has been hired to maintain the work.

Big corps suck.

Edit -- reading some the responses here on this topic and they are...eye-opening and depressing.

Rarely have I seen an actually straightforward, simple feature that can be done in a day used as the basis to spin up a 3-week mini-project with a complicated new architecure.

What happens is a complicated-sounding feature is requested, and some devs will just take it literally and implement it, maybe along with some amount of "future-proofing" that logically follows because the spec is poorly scoped.

Other devs will spend some time thinking about it, realize that there is a really a simple requirement at the core of the request, and it only sounds complex because it was vaguely specified (or maybe these days an LLM was used to write the spec, and its vomit was copy-pasted verbatim). They just implement the simple thing that is the actual need.

This is one place where the agile/scrum practice of planning poker can help. You get a few smart people in a room, and discuss the story and its requirements. Hopefully someone will throw out a low number of points and say "isn't this simply asking for..."

Over my career, most of the complicated code I have written is no longer running. What is still running after 10 years? Postgres (or more broadly, a relational database). Fad frameworks or architectures come and go pretty quickly, they don't end up working as advertised, and it's on to the next thing. I no longer want to spend time in this hamster wheel churning out complicated code that will only end up as next year's tech debt.

Instead I went to the hardware store across the street and bought the biggest (and cheapest) screwdriver I could find and attached it with some cord to the HSM. They never lost it afterwards.

— C. A. R. Hoare

The irony is that the elaborate design usually handles those hypotheticals incorrectly anyway, because you can't predict real requirements from imagination. The simple version gets modified when real feedback arrives, and the modifications are cheaper because there's less architecture to work around.

It could be something overbuilt, large organization structures. Brittle solutions that are highly performant until they break. Or products/offerings that don't grow for similar reasons, simpler-is-better, don't compete with yourself. Or those that grow the wrong way-- too many, much to manage, frailty through complexity, sku confusion.

Alternatively, things that are allowed to grow with some leeway, some caution, and then pruned back.

There's failure modes in any of these but the one I see most often is overreaching concern for any single one.

> But for Engineer A’s work, there’s almost nothing to say. “Implemented feature X.” Three words. Her work was better. But it’s invisible because of how simple she made it look. You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.

Well, Engineer A's manager should help her writing a better version of her output. It's not easy, but it's their work. And if this simpler solution was actually better for the company, it should be highlighted how in terms that make sense for the business. I might be naive and too optimistic but good engineers with decent enough managers will stand out in the long run. That doesn't exclude that a few "bad" engineers can game their way up at the same time, even in functional organizations. though.

The environment where the over-engineer tends to be promoted is one where the engineering department is (too) far separated from where the end users are. Think of very large organizations with walled departments, or organizations where there simply is not enough to do so engineers start to build stuff to fight non existing issues.

I've noticed the incentive breaks down even further when you consider that simplicity often means saying no upfront, which requires correctly predicting future maintenance costs that nobody has experienced yet. Complexity requires no such foresight. You just build the thing someone asked for.

The orgs where I've seen this actually work had explicit "deleted lines" culture, where removing code was celebrated as loudly as shipping features. Not many places do that. Most treat a 2000-line deletion PR with the same energy as taking out the trash.

One thing engineers can do to fight this, and I think it's mentioned in the article, is to write extensive documentation. Bosses in these companies are too lazy to dig into solutions and figure out for themselves; so they resort to proxies like the number of lines of code, number of pages in the design doc, etc.

Unfortunately, some of us who aim for simplicity are also averse to writing long docs; but with the advent of LLMs, there is some relief in sight.

My career has suffered a lot in terms of promos, etc. because I hate complexity.

Rather than trying to anticipate all the different failure modes one tries at first just to handle fact of failure itself, assuming there's no remediation.

If there's a way to make sure the worst case isn't terrible in some simple way then you do that first - like making a backup file or tr4ying to keep APIs idempotent so you can recover from issues and so on.

And complexity doesn't always sell better. A lot of times it might look like the whole thing is messy, or too hard to maintain, tech burden nightmare. Things that are simple might look complex and vice versa too, I think anyone who had to implement requirements from people who don't understand the implementation complexities will know this very well.

So the way we write software piecemeal today is fundamentally broken. Rather than starting with frameworks and adding individual packages, we should be starting with everything and let the compiler do tree shaking/dead code elimination.

Of course nobody does it that way, so we don't know what we're missing out on. But I can tell you that early in my programming journey, I started with stuff like HyperCard that gave you everything, and I was never more productive than that down the road. Also early C/C++ projects in the 80s and 90s often used a globals.h header that gave you everything so you rarely had to write glue code. Contrast that with today, where nearly everything is just glue code (a REST API is basically a collection of headers).

A good middle ground is to write all necessary scaffolding up front, waterfall style, which is just exactly what the article argues against doing. Because it's 10 times harder to add it to an existing codebase. And 100 times harder to add it once customers start asking for use cases that should have been found during discovery and planning. This is the 1-10-100 rule of the cost of bugs, applied to conceptual flaws in a program's design.

I do miss seeing articles with clarity like this on HN though, even if I slightly disagree with this one's conclusions after working in the field for quite some time.

This was the model at my last job. The "director" of software had strong opinions about the most random topics and talked about them like they would be revolutionary. His team was so far from the product teams they would just build random crap that was unhelpful but technically demo'ed well. Never put into practice. Promoted for 4 years, then fired.

I've only worked at my startup so I can't comment on scale elsewhere, but if our simple architecture can handle 30k requests per second, I think it can handle most other companies scale too.

There's a short film making the rounds that captures this perfectly -- an employee uses AI to generate the quarterly results his whole department was working on, and instead of being promoted, he gets fired: https://youtu.be/O5FFkHUdKyE

The simplicity penalty is even worse when the simplification comes from AI. It's not just "you made us look bad" -- it's "you made our entire team look unnecessary."

Of course, over-simplification is the wrong decision some times, the same as abstraction and complexity is the wrong decision some times...

Your shortcut for promotion is generally building value for the company, but people need to remember that promotions support the business and they aren't free to the company.

It was a 8 bit embedded application in something like 10k of code. When I left I generated a short and clear explanation of why what I had done was awesome in terms of their future business ... because that is what you have to do if you work contracts. Which is the real message of the article. You have to write things up.