Comment by BjoernKW | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BjoernKW | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not just you and yes, we often do overcomplicate software development.

It's been that way long before agile methodology or microservices though. Complexity-for-the-sake-of-complexity EverthingHasToBeAnAbstractClass frameworks have been plaguing the software development business since at least the 1990s and I'm sure there are similar stories from the 80s and 70s.

It's hard to find a one-size-fits-all easy method for not falling into that over-engineering / over-management trap. I try to focus on simple principles to identify needless complexity:

- There is no silver bullet (see "microservices"): If the same design pattern is used to solve each and every problem there probably is something amiss.

- Less code is better.

- Favour disposable code over reusable code: Avoid the trap of premature optimisation, both in terms of performance and in terms of software architecture. Also known as "You aren't gonna need it".

- Code means communication: By writing code you’re entering a conversation with other developers, including your future self. If code isn't easily comprehensible again there's likely something wrong.

I think the tendency to over-engineer is a symptom of retrofitting an assembly-line 9-5 shift onto the creative process of writing code.

You sit a guy there 5 days a week for many years. He has to look busy, he has to do something with all of that time. He's not going to get paid if he writes the code in the most simple, concise, and straightforward way possible and then goes home until they're ready to make a new feature two weeks later. He has to sit around and make up something for himself to do.

Contrast with side projects. I have many simple weekend projects that continue to work well and provide their promised utility years later. Because you just write what you need and stop, you don't get sucked into the disastrous complexity spiral that every company-internal software project ends up as.

The other factor here is that people need some signal to say "I'm good at my job" (because no one can actually tell). That signal has to go to colleagues, superiors, and peers outside the workplace. People therefore invent artificial complexity or take intentionally convoluted approaches so they can sound fancy. In the most extreme cases, this is a conscious decision designed to block out "competitors" (colleagues). In many cases, it's a subconscious way to ego-stroke (and to mix in a little bit of variety per point one above).

This is especially true when a household brand like Google or Facebook pushes out some new esoteric thing; everyone wants to see themselves as a Google-or-Facebook-in-waiting and it makes it easy to pitch these things to the bosses, when the fact is that the kinds of things that work at large public companies like Google are probably not going to work in small companies.

Thank you for shining a light on the psychological side of this discussion. I like to highlight psychology when I have these discussions with peers because too often technical folks view the world through technology lenses instead of human ones.

Very accurate and poignant.

> Less code is better.

I'd change this to "Write as little code as necessary, but no less." The problem with "Less code is better" is that some folks use that as justification to write clever one-liners that are difficult for other developers to read. That is not better.

That aside, I agree with everything else you said!

> some folks use that as justification to write clever one-liners that are difficult for other developers to read.

Seriously - Please, if you do this, stop it! You're just slowing everyone else down.

There's also a tendency to "architect" things so that common things can be reduced to one liners. A common one is to create form generators via attributes. Things always end up being way more complicated this way.

> Favour disposable code over reusable code: Avoid the trap of premature optimisation, both in terms of performance and in terms of software architecture.

Some people call it "premature generalization". Relevant C2 page: http://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureGeneralization

The day I learned about premature generalization is that day my speed as a developer jumped by a factor of three. When you're generalizing, it's easy to overlook how much time that takes.

My rule these days is that, in most cases, I shouldn't generalize before the same code exists in three places. Why not two? In my experience, things that are done twice aren't necessarily done three times. But things that are done three times are likely to be done a fourth.

Also, when you've got something that's the same in two places it's hard to tell if it's really the same concept or just a "rhyme" that might later evolve into two distinct things.

> Favour disposable code over reusable code

I prefer this way of putting it over YAGNI. This makes it sound more like the trade-off it is.

It's interesting to work alone on a big-ish project with no one telling you what to do and not having to explain anything to anyone. It easily feels ten-times more productive (in terms of accomplishment), but then again it won't have a business case and one doesn't get paid, either.

I think I'm least productive in open source (again, in terms of felt accomplishment), because if one isn't the sole maintainer (like above), then it's a pretty safe bet that few changes take less than a certain baseline (eg. 1 hour) -- someone always has a nitpick, CI always takes it's sweet time, oh, did we discuss yet in which branches we wanna merge this? Ah, please avoid puns in documentation and comments. Do we want this? Can you write this differently, like ...? Did you manually test this or that scenario ...?

(Now this also has advantages in terms of stability, quality and consistency -- but it's also obviously far, far less efficient)

On the clock it's more like "Meh, change that and that, otherwise it's good, so merge it after these changes and tell ops to put it in prod"

100% this, applying occam's razor to software engineering, the simplest solution is most often the best one.

It always amazes me, the instinct by engineers to overcomplicate things. They shoot themselves in the foot and curse when the inevitable subtle bugs start rolling in.

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