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I call myself an engineer- but the way I understand it is that I still have to know when to use a hammer like simply copy paste code and not some complex solution.

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The problem in software is that very frequently you dont have a real hammer. You have hundred amalgamations of swiss army knives that do everything. Like what is the hammer when you want to add some nice dynamic content to a website? Is it just javascript or maybe react?, Angular?, Svelte? Or another example: you want to code a command line app, what language is a hammer here?: C++?, Go?, Bash?, Python?

This analogy falls apart the moment you apply it to anything in software.

Well, the engineer first move should be "do we really need this dynamic to achieve the global goal, or can we do without"?

Most of the time however stakeholders will prefer that someone unleash the last technical shiny tech stack (that no one master in the team and that is about to be dethroned by the even newest thing) to deliver a pixel perfect reproduction of the mock-up rather than question the relevance of the proposal.

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