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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is something going wrong in the software engineering education pipeline that is encouraging developers to always keep reaching for the most complex tool in the toolbox rather than the simplest. We all see this all the time, so the problem is widespread. Maybe it’s not education but career growth: It sounds like “resume-driven development” where people are incentivized to add complex tools to their toolbox merely so they can get hired at places that select for complex tool use.

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I think it's just inherent in the personality types that are successful at software. We are good at understandinging complex things, and we like it; it makes us feel good to master them, and creating one is a special variety of mastery, so we incline towards that.

I think it also takes experience to see that simple solutions can be more robust; the more natural response to foreseeing future problems (another trait) is to have specific responses for all of them, which generates a complex result.

Sometimes people haven't been exposed to different ways to solve problems, so they reach for the first thing that comes to mind. Sometimes the never learn to consider multiple solutions and weigh their costs and benefits.

I once had a boss who still coded, even though all the developers begged him to stop. His code was spaghetti, but worse was his inability to come up with more than one solution to a problem. If the first solution he came up with was complicated and error-prone then that's the one he proceeded with.

I hear this often, and I see many on HN be in favor of this narrative, but I have the opposite experience. Its often the cargo-culting companies pushing these soft requirements onto education, as students and companies will otherwise complain about not being employable / finding starters who reach their expectations respectively. Most of the time, I see seniors reach for overly complicated solutions, when much simpler solutions exist. Which later falls apart when errors happen silently and simple ideologies like "single truth" are ignored for no particularly good reason, leading to massive duplicate code and gotchas.

At this point, I'm extremely unconvinced the problem is just education or juniority/seniority. The "paper factory" is just doing what companies are demanding. The real problem is a general lack of competence being used to market products, be they good when used properly (e.g. GoF, where many readers only look at design patterns and completely forget "composition over inheritance"), or snake oil.

In my experience the most common cause for this phenomena is that the devs are afraid they won't be employable if they don't utilize those fads or, as you very correctly summarized it: resume-driven development.

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