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Comment by age_bronze | Hacker News Reader

Are there actually experienced developers who still overengineer? I always thought of that as something that happens from the lack of experience. Straight from university developers, or people who never worked with a team before tend to do that, but I can't see how you will hold off this attitude after a bit of experience. And unless you're letting an inexperienced developer lead your team I can't see the problem. As long as the team leader eventually communicates and pushes an overengineer in the right direction (make it work > make it simple > make it generic), is this really a problem?

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I worked with a guy who felt a burning need to use a certain JS functional utility library for literally everything. He would even use the library to access properties of objects instead of using JS's built in dot operator. This led to a lot of over-engineering on the micro level, although he had good practices on the macro level. The project was well thought out, but open any file and you'd see a bunch of this library's fanciest functional tricks.

I found it pretty bizarre. My guess was that he simply applied a different standard to code than most other people. Instead of preferring simple and obvious code, there was some other arbitrary criteria of cleverness he was looking for. This guy was very experienced as well. I think it may just have been boredom.

I have seen experienced developers that overengineer. It's hard to definitively know why, but I suspect sometimes it's so they can get some new "thing" on their resume or added to the approved toolbox for their team.

I tend to think of overengineering of a team member as the mistake of the team leader, unless you're really hiring a solo developer then you'd better pick an experienced one.

If you communicate your priorities properly, you put real emphasis on not creating unneeded code, people aren't stupid, they wouldn't do that. Most projects don't live in vacuum, and the difference between overengineered solution and a good solution depends on outside requirements, and that's the job of the team member to keep it on track.

I could have been talking about the team leader in this case. They are fallible people too. It wouldn't be unheard of for one to to introduce Kafka, Elastic Search, React, etc, when it wasn't needed...for reasons unrelated to the task at hand. As mentioned, one reason would be to gain experience in it, or to get it pre-approved for the team to use...in some future more appropriate situation.

> lack of experience

Some people have 10 years of coding experience. Others have 1 year of experience 10 times.

He is experienced developer with great coding skills

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