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Comment by mhotchen | Hacker News Reader

Many of the programmers I have worked with actually love complexity, despite trying to convince others (and most likely themselves) that they hate it.

Advice tends to be cherrypicked to suit an agenda they already have (with your example on microservices, the vast amount of resources saying they're very difficult, should be driven by a monolith first approach, and solve a specific set of problems is largely brushed under the rug).

I think because our industry moves so fast there's a fear of becoming irrelevant. Ironically companies are so scared of not being able to employ developers that they're also onboard with complicating their platform in the name of hiring and retention. I think this is down to the sad truth that most developer roles offer very little challenge outside of learning a new stack.

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> I think this is down to the sad truth that most developer roles offer very little challenge outside of learning a new stack.

This is a gem observation from this thread. In my own tech sphere the first thing developers are talking about with each other is the new x,y,z lib or framework they're using to accomplish something relatively banal. There's still a lot of work out there that really boils down to basic CRUD and reporting at the end of the day, and developers naturally begin to invent complexities on top of that CRUD to make the work interesting and challenging. I'm absolutely guilty of this first hand.

I've found personally it also doesn't help that past work on projects e.g. large Rails apps that were never architected well turn out to be such nightmares to work on. The memory of the end state of these projects lingers with developers as they move onto the next piece of work, and they're inclined to say "no that doesn't work" and pick up shiny new-tech to do the old job instead.

As a side analogy: most small business construction jobs, e.g. building a timber frame house, don't involve the builders arriving on site and are stumped by the challenge of how to put up the framing for the bedroom walls - there's also very little challenge in these projects, yet the reward is in the completion.

> There's still a lot of work out there that really boils down to basic CRUD and reporting at the end of the day, and developers naturally begin to invent complexities on top of that CRUD to make the work interesting and challenging.

I'd go so far as to say that _most_ work today (at least in startups) is building CRUD apps. The technology has changed, but the work hasn't. Inside of building CRUD apps in Rails, we now build them in React.

> This is a gem observation from this thread. In my own tech sphere the first thing developers are talking about with each other is the new x,y,z lib or framework they're using to accomplish something relatively banal.

The thing is, there is so much other stuff to learn/fix. Where I'm working now most of my day is trying to understand the layers and layers of code they built. If they'd stuck to simpler code I could be learning more about the business and the users workflows. I could be improving the UI with that knowledge, I could be optimizing the business. Instead all my efforts go into understanding the code base.

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