It's all they've seen. They don't get why they're doing it, because they're junior devs masquerading as architects. There's so many 'senior' or 'architect' level devs in our industry who are utterly useless.

One app I got brought in late on the architect had done some complicated mediator pattern for saving data with a micro service architecture. They'd also semi-implemented DDD.

It was a ten page form. Literally that was what it was supposed to replace. An existing paper, 10 page, form. One of those "domains" was a list of the 1,000 schools in the country. That needed to be updated once a year.

A government spent millions on this thing.

I could have done it on my todd in 3 months. It just needed to use simple forms, with some simple client side logic for hiding sections, and save the data with an ORM.

The funniest bit was when I said that it couldn't handle the load because the architecture had obvious bottlenecks. The load was known and fairly trivial (100k form submissions in one month).

The architect claimed that it wasn't possible as the architecture was all checked and approved by one of the big 5.

So I brought the test server down during the call by making 10 requests at once.