I don’t like the snarky attitude in the post. I don’t work on backend systems but the problem described is similar elsewhere: less knowledgeable or naive programmer writes a feature which looks simple but would create more work to maintain in the long run, a more expert programmer trying to sway said programmer to change the design without forcing a total change.

What irritated me was the underlying sound that programmers of category 1 are always building bad solutions and programmer 2 has to fight to save the day. It feels like this person has worked to long in a bad position and started to see the world in this simple black and white form.

To be fair I’ve been there before myself. I maintain a ton of build pipelines and build tools. And for a while I had the world view of them against me. Them, who by design create bad build scripts which never scale and never survive a second use-case change and me, the unsung hero who fights the verbal battle why one should not write build output into the build source directory etc.

For me it boiled down to understand that these other people where not standing in line to make my life harder. They simply didn’t know or had no capacity to learn this because they also had their fair share of problems in their respective domains etc.

I think there is some good information in this post. But I would have liked if it had been wrapped differently.