I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build.

I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was.

So now you get Engineer B's output even faster, with even more impressive-sounding abstractions, and the promotion packet writes itself in minutes too. Meanwhile the actual cost - debugging, onboarding, incident response at 3am - stays exactly the same or gets worse, because now nobody fully understands what was generated.

The real test for simplicity has always been: can the next person who touches this code understand it without asking you? AI-generated complexity fails that test spectacularly.

In the FAANGs I've worked at, engineers who come from scrappy companies and implement hacks (Like the example of emailing spreadsheets around) undermine the business and will cost the productivity of thousands of people.

However, at the startups I've worked at, the folks from big companies that try to implement a super complex thing (e.g. exotic databases, overly ambitious infrastructure) The results are equally catastrophic for a company attempting to bootstrap when the complexity is so far removed from their core business.

What makes an experienced engineer is recognizing both states, understanding what works where and making the right trade-offs, usually from experience you can't fake your way through. I've seen a lot of projects that took 10-20 engineers 18 months to so we could sell something that landed a $100M contract with a customer. You see that enough times and you won't bias as hard against complexity. But of course it's situation dependent, like anything.

In many ways, the Door Desk award was for simplicity. I remember, one time, someone got an award for getting rid of some dumb operations room with some big unused LCD TVs. When you won these awards, you rarely got any kind of reward. It was just acknowledgement at the meeting. But that time, they literally gave the guy the TVs.

The longest lived projects and solutions I've worked on have always been the simplest, easiest to replace solutions. Often derived from simple tests scenarios or solutions that just work and get shifted over without much re-work.

What's somewhat funny, with this is that AI code assistants have actually helped a lot with continuing this approach for me... I can create a stand alone solution to work on a library or component, work through the problems, then copy the component/library into the actual work project it was for. I'm in a really locked down internalized environment, so using AI for component dev is on my own hardware... but the resulting work is a piece that can be brought in as-is. No exposure of internal data/resources.

I don't think I'll have a level of trust to "one-shot" or vibe code solutions from AI, but leveraging the ability to spin up a project as a sample to test a component/library is pretty great to say the least.

"Reduced incidents by 80%", "Decreased costs by 40%", "Increased performance by 33% while decreasing server footprint by 25%"

Simplicity for its own sake is not valued. The results of simplicity are highly valued.

Of course, over-simplification is the wrong decision some times, the same as abstraction and complexity is the wrong decision some times...

Your shortcut for promotion is generally building value for the company, but people need to remember that promotions support the business and they aren't free to the company.

I guess it may be important to underscore the value that simplicity provides over needless complexity or to sell people on the value of problems prevented rather than preventable catastrophes that were dealt with

Maybe we could encourage a culture of patting people on the back for maintaining reliable "boring" systems

Some people also crave "drama" so there might be a way to frame "boring reliability" as some kind of "epic daily maintenance struggle that was successfully navigated"

I've noticed the incentive breaks down even further when you consider that simplicity often means saying no upfront, which requires correctly predicting future maintenance costs that nobody has experienced yet. Complexity requires no such foresight. You just build the thing someone asked for.

The orgs where I've seen this actually work had explicit "deleted lines" culture, where removing code was celebrated as loudly as shipping features. Not many places do that. Most treat a 2000-line deletion PR with the same energy as taking out the trash.

It was a 8 bit embedded application in something like 10k of code. When I left I generated a short and clear explanation of why what I had done was awesome in terms of their future business ... because that is what you have to do if you work contracts. Which is the real message of the article. You have to write things up.

In the hands of an experienced developer/designer, AI will help them achieve a good result faster.

In the hands of someone inexperienced, out of their depth, AI will just help them create a mess faster, and without the skill to assess what's been generated they may not even know it.

Too often the smallest changeset is, yes, simple, but totally unaware of the surrounding context, breaks expectations and conventions, causes race conditions, etc.

The good bit in tfa is near the end:

> when someone asks “shouldn’t we future-proof this?”, don’t just cave and go add layers. Try: “Here’s what it would take to add that later if we need it, and here’s what it costs us to add it now. I think we wait.” You’re not pushing back, but showing you’ve done your homework. You considered the complexity and chose not to take it on.

Instead you talk about how you complete all your tasks and have so much bandwidth remaining compared to all your peers, the beneficial results of simplicity. Being severely under used while demonstrating the ability to do 2x-10x more work than everybody else is what gets you promoted.

In this vein simplicity is like hard work. Nobody gives a shit about hard work either. Actually, if all you have to show is how hard you work you are a liability. Instead its all about how little you work provided and that you accomplish the same, or more, than everybody else.

Adding extra things can always help, specially like in the UI side of things, since higher ups will probably just notice that part.

It's not just the most "elaborate system". The same thing happens in so many other ways. For example a good/simple solution is one and done. Whereas a complex one will be an interminable cause of indirect issued down the road. With the second engineer being the one fixing them.

Then there's another pattern of the 10x (not the case with all 10x-ers) seeding or asked to "fix" other projects, then moving on to the next, leaving all the debt to the team.

It's really an amazing dynamic that can be studied from a game theoretical perspective. It's perhaps one of the adjacent behaviors that support the Gervais principle.

It's also likely going to be over soon, now that AI is normalizing a lot of this work.

At core, complexity is derived from discovery of demand within those pesky complex humans.

Simplicity is the mechanism of finding common pathways within the mess of complexity of a product.

the tragedy is that simplicity is very expensive and beyond most organizations ability to support (especially since it can slow down demand discovery), and this is one of the allures of big tech for me. I was greatly rewarded and promoted for achieving simplicity within infrastructure.

So the way we write software piecemeal today is fundamentally broken. Rather than starting with frameworks and adding individual packages, we should be starting with everything and let the compiler do tree shaking/dead code elimination.

Of course nobody does it that way, so we don't know what we're missing out on. But I can tell you that early in my programming journey, I started with stuff like HyperCard that gave you everything, and I was never more productive than that down the road. Also early C/C++ projects in the 80s and 90s often used a globals.h header that gave you everything so you rarely had to write glue code. Contrast that with today, where nearly everything is just glue code (a REST API is basically a collection of headers).

A good middle ground is to write all necessary scaffolding up front, waterfall style, which is just exactly what the article argues against doing. Because it's 10 times harder to add it to an existing codebase. And 100 times harder to add it once customers start asking for use cases that should have been found during discovery and planning. This is the 1-10-100 rule of the cost of bugs, applied to conceptual flaws in a program's design.

I do miss seeing articles with clarity like this on HN though, even if I slightly disagree with this one's conclusions after working in the field for quite some time.

As a consultant/contractor I always evangelise simplification and modelling problems from first principles. I jump between companies every 6-12 months, cleaning up after years of complexity-driven development, or outright designing robust systems that anybody (not just the author) can maintain and extend.

This level of honesty helps you build a reputation. I am never short for work. I also bill more than I could ever as a full-time engineer based in Europe.

One thing engineers can do to fight this, and I think it's mentioned in the article, is to write extensive documentation. Bosses in these companies are too lazy to dig into solutions and figure out for themselves; so they resort to proxies like the number of lines of code, number of pages in the design doc, etc.

Unfortunately, some of us who aim for simplicity are also averse to writing long docs; but with the advent of LLMs, there is some relief in sight.

My career has suffered a lot in terms of promos, etc. because I hate complexity.

In fact, simplicity often is the best future-proofing. Complex designs come with maintenance costs, so simple designs are inherently more robust to reorgs, shifted priorities, and team downsizing.

I've only worked at my startup so I can't comment on scale elsewhere, but if our simple architecture can handle 30k requests per second, I think it can handle most other companies scale too.

BUT, at least very occasionally I have seen people get promoted for simplicity, I've even successfully made the case myself. With a problem that was itself so complex that it was causing fires on a regular basis, and staff & principal engineers didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. When a senior eng spent a couple of weeks thinking about the problem and eventually figured out a way to reframe it and simplify the solution, melting away months of work, making the promo case was actually quite easy.

The problem is, the opportunities to burn down complexity like that don't present themselves nearly as often as the opportunities to overcomplicate a thing, which are pretty much unbounded.

[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1305.PDF

The sad thing is that it is common to get fired when you make things better bc then your work is perceived as "done" and your skills are no longer necessary. There are countless IT job stories where someone delivers a technical solution that saves a company a ton of money or generates revenue, then they get fired bc the solution has been delivered and an off shore team has been hired to maintain the work.

Big corps suck.

Edit -- reading some the responses here on this topic and they are...eye-opening and depressing.

I built a showback model at a prior org. Re-used shelfware for the POC, did the research on granular costs for storage, compute, real estate, electricity, HVAC maintenance, hardware amortization, the whole deal. Could tell you down to the penny how much a given estate cost on-prem.

Simple. Elegant. $0 in spend to get running in production, modest spend to expand into public cloud (licensing, mainly). Went absolutely nowhere.

Got RIFed. On the way out the door, I hear a whole-ass team did the same thing, using additional budget, with lower confidence results. The biggest difference of all? My model gave you the actual cost in local currency, theirs gave you an imagined score.

The complexity (cost of a team, unnecessary scoring) was rewarded, not the simplicity.

There's a short film making the rounds that captures this perfectly -- an employee uses AI to generate the quarterly results his whole department was working on, and instead of being promoted, he gets fired: https://youtu.be/O5FFkHUdKyE

The simplicity penalty is even worse when the simplification comes from AI. It's not just "you made us look bad" -- it's "you made our entire team look unnecessary."

More than once I have seen the same project yield two separate promotions, for creating it and deleting it. In particular this happens when the timescale of projects is longer than a single engineer's tenure on a given team.

But yes, avoiding complexity is rarely rewarded. The only way in which it helps you get promoted is that each simple thing takes less time and breaks less often, so you actually get more done.

This was the model at my last job. The "director" of software had strong opinions about the most random topics and talked about them like they would be revolutionary. His team was so far from the product teams they would just build random crap that was unhelpful but technically demo'ed well. Never put into practice. Promoted for 4 years, then fired.

Instead I went to the hardware store across the street and bought the biggest (and cheapest) screwdriver I could find and attached it with some cord to the HSM. They never lost it afterwards.

Rarely have I seen an actually straightforward, simple feature that can be done in a day used as the basis to spin up a 3-week mini-project with a complicated new architecure.

What happens is a complicated-sounding feature is requested, and some devs will just take it literally and implement it, maybe along with some amount of "future-proofing" that logically follows because the spec is poorly scoped.

Other devs will spend some time thinking about it, realize that there is a really a simple requirement at the core of the request, and it only sounds complex because it was vaguely specified (or maybe these days an LLM was used to write the spec, and its vomit was copy-pasted verbatim). They just implement the simple thing that is the actual need.

This is one place where the agile/scrum practice of planning poker can help. You get a few smart people in a room, and discuss the story and its requirements. Hopefully someone will throw out a low number of points and say "isn't this simply asking for..."

Over my career, most of the complicated code I have written is no longer running. What is still running after 10 years? Postgres (or more broadly, a relational database). Fad frameworks or architectures come and go pretty quickly, they don't end up working as advertised, and it's on to the next thing. I no longer want to spend time in this hamster wheel churning out complicated code that will only end up as next year's tech debt.

And complexity doesn't always sell better. A lot of times it might look like the whole thing is messy, or too hard to maintain, tech burden nightmare. Things that are simple might look complex and vice versa too, I think anyone who had to implement requirements from people who don't understand the implementation complexities will know this very well.

— C. A. R. Hoare

The irony is that the elaborate design usually handles those hypotheticals incorrectly anyway, because you can't predict real requirements from imagination. The simple version gets modified when real feedback arrives, and the modifications are cheaper because there's less architecture to work around.

The environment where the over-engineer tends to be promoted is one where the engineering department is (too) far separated from where the end users are. Think of very large organizations with walled departments, or organizations where there simply is not enough to do so engineers start to build stuff to fight non existing issues.

> But for Engineer A’s work, there’s almost nothing to say. “Implemented feature X.” Three words. Her work was better. But it’s invisible because of how simple she made it look. You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.

Well, Engineer A's manager should help her writing a better version of her output. It's not easy, but it's their work. And if this simpler solution was actually better for the company, it should be highlighted how in terms that make sense for the business. I might be naive and too optimistic but good engineers with decent enough managers will stand out in the long run. That doesn't exclude that a few "bad" engineers can game their way up at the same time, even in functional organizations. though.

Your job is to deliver value. If you can get stuff done quicker and without it breaking, you did great. Some one who spent more time doing the same thing except took longer and has a more brittle solution they have to keep going back and fixing doesn't look good.

And simple solutions are easier to explain and convince people.

It's hard to keep things simple. Management should be mindful of that and encourage engineers to follow YAGNI, to do refactorings that remove more code than they add, etc.

It could be something overbuilt, large organization structures. Brittle solutions that are highly performant until they break. Or products/offerings that don't grow for similar reasons, simpler-is-better, don't compete with yourself. Or those that grow the wrong way-- too many, much to manage, frailty through complexity, sku confusion.

Alternatively, things that are allowed to grow with some leeway, some caution, and then pruned back.

There's failure modes in any of these but the one I see most often is overreaching concern for any single one.

a) finding a new theoretical frame that simplifies the space or solutions, helps people think through it in a principled way

b) finding ways to use existing abstractions, that others may not have been able to find

c) using non-technical levers, like working at the org/business/UX level to cut scope, simplify requirements,

The way you can make complexity work for your career, is to make it clear why the problem is complex, and then what you did to simplify the problem. If you just present a simple solution, no one will get it. It’s like “showing your work”.

In some orgs, this is hopeless, as they really do reward complexity of implementation.

Promotions are supposed to incentivise people to stay, rather than leave. If the company never promoted anyone, people would leave. So there needs to be a path for promoting people. But that process doesn’t have to be transparent, or consistent, or fair - in-fact it rarely is.

You promote people who consistently overdeliver, on time, at or below cost, who are a pleasure to work with, who would benefit the company long term, who would be a pain to lose. A key precondition is that such people consistently get more done compared to other people with equal pay, otherwise, they don’t stand out and they are not promotion material.

What counts as overdelivering will vary based on specific circumstances. It’s a subjective metric. Are you involved with a highly visible project, or are you working on some BS nobody would miss if it got axed? Are you part of a small team, or are you in a bloated, saturated org? Are you the go-to person when shit hits the fan, or are you a nobody people don’t talk to? Are you consistent, or are you vague and unpredictable? Does your work impact any relevant bottom lines, or are you just part of a cost centre? It really isn’t rocket science, for the most part.

- CV-driven development. Adding {buzzword} with {in production} sounds better than saying I managed to make simple solutions faster.

- Job security. Those who wish to stay longer make things complicated, unsupportable, and unmaintainable, so they become irreplaceable.

Can you actually imagine a promo committee evaluating the technical choices? "Ok, this looks pretty complex. I feel like you could have just used a DB table, though? Denied."

Absolutely not! That discussion happens in RFCs, in architecture reviews, in hallway meetings, and a dozen other places.

If you want simplicity, you need to encourage mentorship, peer review, and meaningful participation in consensus-building. You need to reward team-first behavior and discourage lone-wolf brilliance. This is primarily a leadership job, but everybody contributes.

But that's harder than complaining that everything seems complicated.

It can even happen that the tag "very smart" gets attached to those sidelined engineers. That's not necessarily a compliment.

In smaller companies it's a lot easier to express the distinctions and values of simplicity to ears that might actually appreciate it (so long as you can translate it into what they value - simple example is pointing out that you produced the same result in much less time, and that you can get more done on overall feature/task level as a result).

The engineer that consistently quotes 3x my expectation (and ends up taking 4x with bugs) is going to look way worse than the engineer that ships things quickly with no drama.

The obvious outcome will be that the most skilled pretenders optimizing for their selfish profit narrow view, no matter what the consequences will be for the collectivity on large scale and at long terms.

Essentially, there are two parallel teams, one is seen constantly huddling together, working late, fixing their (broken) service. The other team is quiet, leaves on time, their service never has serious issues. Which do you think looks better from the outside?

In my (limited) experience as an engineer and manager, leadership (e.g., a VP) didn’t like (or reward) simplicity. Simple solutions often meant smaller teams, which wasn’t something they were pushing for, especially pre-2024. I do think this is slowly evolving, and that the best leaders now focus on removing unnecessary complexity and improving velocity.

I don't think this phenomenon is unique to programming. My plumber was explaining how he put in a manifold and centralized whole-house off valve accessible indoors and I was like, okay, thanks? I can just turn it off at the street.

Only established professionals have the status and self-confidence to show restraint. I think that explains interviews.

The real question is how do you tell engineer A who can figure out how to make the complex problems simple from engineer C who can't handle complexity and so writes simple solutions when the complex one is needed.

> The interviewer is like: “What about scalability? What if you have ten million users?”

This reminded me of how much more fun I find it to work on software that always only has one user, and where scaling problems are related solely to the data and GUI interaction design.

> It also shows up in design reviews. An engineer proposes a clean, simple approach and gets hit with “shouldn’t we future-proof this?” So they go back and add layers they don’t need yet, abstractions for problems that might never materialize, flexibility for requirements nobody has asked for. Not because the problem demanded it, but because the room expected it.

$100 says the "clean, simple" approach is the one which directly couples the frontend to the backend to the database. Dependencies follow the control flow exactly, so that if you want to test the frontend, you must have the backend running. If you want to test the backend, you must have the database running.

The "abstractions for problems that might never materialize" are your harnesses for running real business logic under unit-test conditions, that is, instantly and deterministically.

If you do the "simple" thing now, and push away pesky "future-proofing" like architecting for testing, then "I will test this" becomes "I will test this later" becomes "You can't test this" becomes "You shouldn't test this."

For example, person A implements the simple solution, gets the project done faster while person B over engineers, has seemingly impressive stuff to talk about but at the end of the day doesn't ship.

A lot of this boils down to promo system being so systematized. I've never heard of people in any other field min/max their promotions as hard along with all of the expert jargon in any other field I've worked in. Packets, peers, comp, other co comps, what your boss thinks of you, what your boss thinks of your peers (nee: competitors), and the inevitable crash out when they don't get the promotion. All part of the bigco experience! I feel like when we systematized comp into ranks Lx, Ly we gave up our leverage a little bit.

Problem is in big tech -- the incentives are all aligned towards complex stuff

you wanna get promoted - do complex stuff that doesn't make sense. If you get promoted, then it also boosts the performance of your manager.

the only way to escape this nonsense is to work at smaller companies

right now you've people advocating for A.I coded solutions yet never realizing that A.I solutions result in a convoluted mess since A.I never possesses the ART of software engineering i.e knowing what to cut out

Good leaders perceive workhorse vs showhorse spectrum, critical toil vs needless flash (and vice versa).

It’s hard. Most fail at hard things. The industry in the aggregate will fail at hard things

So you get articles like this.

This extends to suggesting huge licenses like from Salesforce. The Marketing and HR teams are ecstatic that they can purchase another license of their favorite software, they can go shopping! If I had implemented a free and more efficient CRM, there would be no networking effect.

This all builds systems that are vastly more expensive (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars), slower, and much harder to fix. YCombinator financially benefits from this and it's all very corrupt. Most of the time, I have to really gain the "soft skills" to activate the networking (nepotism) effects.

It's not about what you know, it's about who you know.

as a manager its constant fighting the pressure to build "Great software" that is way above what the company needs instead building working software that addresses customer needs in a timely manner.

My dude we are s startup with two servers and 20 customers, we do not need infinite scalability.

Be the change you want to see in the world. If you are in management, promote those that see the value in simplicity.

You can try to explain this OP’s concept to a stakeholder in a 1000 different sensible ways and you’ll get blinking deer-in-headlight eyes back at you.

This skill is hard-earned and, so, rare.

Therefore, many hierarchies are built on sufficient mediocrity top to bottom.

Which works because bottom line doesn’t often matter in software dev anyway.

And even when it does matter it’s multiplicatively rare to have a hierarchy or even the market that it tries to serve who can build, comprehend, handle high power::complexity systems, products, tools.

And long before performance review time, I'd have mentioned further up that A was looking like a 5X engineer - best if we keep her happy.

What happened?

I once hacked a spreadsheet in a week that was good enough to not embark on a multiple-months 3-devs project.

In the same team, I tweaked a configuration file for distributed calculations that shaved 2 minutes of calculation on an action that the user would run thirty times a day.

I got paid all right.

People don't give a shit about complexity or simplicity. They care about two things:

1. Does it work

2. How soon can you ship

There is a third thing that stakeholders really like: when you tell them what they should be building, or not building.