Enterprise apps are complex because they don't focus on solving the business problem, they focus on the tools and frameworks.
Spring is not the cure, it's the disease.
Spring is not the cure, it's the disease.
Someone basically comes with 1 thick tome worth of business knowledge plus 1 thick tome worth of legal restrictions and you're supposed to codify all of that, to the letter, in software. Some of the business logic can make you cry.
Software dev: "But that's not clean/elegant".
Business owner: "Reality doesn't care about elegant/clean, it cares that we build stuff our customers want and that won't get us sued, so we have to implement it to the T".
I would even go so far as to say that the enterprise logic was so straight-forward that most programmers spent their time inventing problems, which is how look at the enterprise market. They's a lot of "inner platforms", meta-problem solving and needlessly complex deployment environments.
Contrast this with my current industry, gaming. Here the problems are real, tangible and hard. Suddenly overcomplication is much less of a problem, because the extra cognitive load becomes too much when your core problem is already hard.
The tax reporting system I get bogged down and mired in the literal thousands of edge cases and exceptions due to the interactions of all of the laws, sometimes written maliciously by some political entity, or sometimes some local municipality goes against the federal laws leading to literally impossible scenarios. On top of that you have things like your company booking transactions one way that they shouldn't have and is now too much of a pain to change so it has to get reported differently at the reporting layer (which itself is a problem as to why this wasn't noticed initially). Very often the gov't specs themselves are contradictory.
Here is an example: stocks can sometimes pay debt interest did you know?! That doesn't come up in any of the fixed income documentation I had to read. But right there in some list of bonds the IRS publishes every year are non-bond things. wtf?! So do you fabricate some new type "debt interest paying thing" of which are mostly composed of bonds and once in a while stocks in your data model? Do you keep your data model clean and fabricate an internal bond to represent the debt part of the stock in these cases and link it to the actual stock? You will have to consult with your legal/tax department and realize if you were to misreport this income what would the resultant fines and loss of customer goodwill is (due to higher chance of them being audited, paying more tax etc)? Do you conclude that your internal team cannot keep up with the ever marching and changing tax law (FATCA anyone wtf?!) and outsource this to a tax reporting company? The scope of our tax reporting is nearly unlimited since the US government seeks to capture all of human endeavor. The results of getting this wrong are very real. People get audited and lose money and sue our company and can go under due to litigation costs. In games, if we fuck up, our company goes under and everyone loses their job but I didn't have to worry so much about potentially ruining the jobs of people outside of our company.
This is actual complexity your software will have to deal with no matter your language/platform.
In my, admittedly limited (never AAA), experience with games I always seemed to be bumping up against physics (time, memory, latency/speed of light) but with enterprise apps it's almost always bumping up against the sum total of human stupidity past and present.
I'm glad to hear if your major challenge in the enterprise was to solve actual problems and produce real value. My journey was mostly learning one over-complicated framework after another, and finally coming to the conclusion that it was mostly for nothing. I was the local Spring expert, but at the same it's biggest critic. The "code", or more accurately the configuration, gets very consise, but you risk ending up with only a handful of people in the building who know how to debug the app properly.
I started coding Java when Sun marketed it as a very pragmatic choice, focusing on "simply writing code". The influence of IBM and the whole JEE movement (including Spring) still looks at the problem of coding from the wrong angle IMO.
Creating a good development environment is not about creating a all-in-one runtime environment or methodology, nor about simplifying the problem space for developers by letting them write plugins to large servers.
It's about establishing a fast RAD cycle and offering a buffet of good libraries, to simplify the writing of code.
Java used to be the language which allowed you to "just program", nowadays the mainstream choices are golang or node. To me it's become very clear that Java is on the wrong track here.
There are an infinite number of distractions as a coder, including Microservices, responsive design, functional purity, patterns etc.
If you managed to duck most of these and end up in a place where you were producing value effectively, you were very lucky judging by my experience :)
That said, I stand by the point that most complexity I've seen has come from infrastructure. Because although the rulesets might be complex, the way they are encoded is usually the source of the problem IMO.
For example, if the rules of the business are encoded in such a way that unit testing them is straight-forward, it puts the business at the center.
But when every rule is testable only in a complex deployment, the complexity of the app is no longer tied to the complexity of the business.
And the latter has been more the rule than the exception in my experience.
We ended up in framework hell. In response, we ditched all the frameworks we were using, went to pure JavaSE, and ended up with a (much!) faster, more reliable enterprise application that was far, far easier to maintain.
Our JEE apps were deployed to these app servers with very little internal support or expertise that very often had devs having to physically log onto production hosts and figure what in the world was wrong, restarting the app server, grepping logs and in general having to learn about these app servers (and usually just shrugging their shoulders at what went wrong). The sum total of things you had to know to keep the JEE deployments up was as much as you had to know about Nix processes PLUS you still had to know all the Nix stuff, except none of the JEE infra was built out since the app servers were just these monstrous processes with hundreds of db connections and thousands of threads.
My team long ago ditched JEE style deployments and have our apps all managed with the batch processing system and have been none of the better for it. Some* of those apps use Spring/Boot but I we've been doing a decent job in the code reviews of just rejecting anything too auto-magikal. Other teams that have stuck with these massive app-servers have stagnated since the deployments are so frail, no one dares make large changes. This is mostly an institutional problem but still the end result was sticking to simpler JavaSE stuff has led to way more productivity.
Enterprise developers aren't stupid but enterprise software is some of the worst software I have encountered in my career. When a development team has one captive customer you get the results you would expect.