Any experienced software engineer or architect understands the nature of trade-offs versus complexity and simplicity. The culture and software development often rewards the complex solution over a simple one because there is a narrative to something complex. Or as with something simple, it’s simply “this was done.”
Picture two engineers on the same team. Engineer A gets assigned a feature. She looks at the problem, considers a few options, and picks the simplest. A straightforward implementation, maybe 50 lines of code. Easy to read, easy to test, easy for the next person to pick up. It works. She ships it in a couple of days and moves on.
Engineer B gets a similar feature. He also looks at the problem, but he sees an opportunity to build something more “robust.” He introduces a new abstraction layer, creates a pub/sub system for communication between components, adds a configuration framework so the feature is “extensible” for future use cases. It takes three weeks. There are multiple PRs. Lots of excited emojis when he shares the document explaining all of this.
