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Comment by DrFell | Hacker News Reader

To me it's simple. A lot of web developers pretentiously covet complexity because it makes them feel smart to wield it. Plus, they never really learned that engineering is the divination of simplicity from complexity. They don't get over-engineering, because isn't that just more of a good thing?

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I think the main problem is that once something works it's marked as "Done" and won't get touched anymore. I often over-engineer massively until I really understand the problem and have something working. But then I try to simplify and delete as much as possible. It seems a lot of people skip the last step.

Not just web developers... lots of developers of all kinds. I’ve seen enough cases in desktop and mobile where a nice simple 30 line function was “refactored” into a 2000 line, 6 class, monster object hierarchy Because Design Patterns and because Reusability.

>To me it's simple. A lot of web developers pretentiously covet complexity because it makes them feel smart to wield it. Plus, they never really learned that engineering is the divination of simplicity from complexity. They don't get over-engineering, because isn't that just more of a good thing?

I think this creeps in on web development in particular because it is so often intensely boring, menial work. When you're a highly educated software engineer that is being paid top dollar to jam out ad-tracking code all day, you end up just making things complex for the fun of it.

That's not entirely wrong, but I think that engineers fall prey to negativity bias [1] in this area. There are tons of really complex tools that we don't hate on because we barely notice that we're using them. They're either things well-engineered enough that the complexity is mostly hidden (think JQuery equivalents), or less well-built things that we learned so early, or use so frequently, that we rarely notice having to deal with their complexity/poor engineering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

jQuery is a nice example. It was a pleasure to use and useful from the start on. Whereas with some of the modern Javascript frameworks you have to create a huge machine before anything can get done.

Then just use JQuery? Nobody is stopping you. Those modern frameworks are excellent if you're making anything bigger than a blog.

Also, creating simplicity is usually much harder than creating complexity.

Additionally, simplicity is rarely appreciated, even by developers.

Complex == I don't understand it yet or (even worse) I don't like it and I want to rewrite it.

Simple == I wrote it and I understand it.

How can I escape from this predicament?

It's an awful predicament because the concepts don't stand on their own; they have to lean on me for their meaning.

Read and understand lots and lots of code to the point where you could reimplement it yourself. Eventually you'll be able to see the difference between simple needles buried in artificially complex haystacks, and actual problem-domain-mandated complexity.

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