Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

I cannot help but wonder, where is our software industry heading? There are overly complicated solutions to simple problems, huge push for moving to fancy stacks just for the sake of moving. Distributed systems? Kubernetes? Rust for CRUD apps? Blockchain, NoSql, crypto, micro-frontends and the list goes on and on. Its gone too extreme to the point where no one is exempt from these things anymore. Couple of years ago, I thought, its fine as long as I am not involved in this complexity, I can turn a blind eye towards it. But now, this unnecessary complexity has seeped in my day job as well. Managers start talking about "micro services", "writing" kubernetes operators in Go, moving away from python (because its too "slow"); someone recently gave a talk in my company, how to make a 500 line python script (which heavily involves in-efficient handling of IO) go faster with Rust. Someone else talks about that we need to move our poly repos into mono-repo because that where the leaders of the industry are moving to. Even recruiters started asking questions like "have u looked at modern languages like Go?"

I cannot help but wonder, that we have possibly screwed ourselves pretty bad, and there is no escape from it. The vocal minority tries to push these overly complex solutions down everyone's throats, and management loves this, because it creates "work" for the sake of it, but it doesn't add any real business value.

What are your thoughts on this? Will industry move towards simple solutions after experiencing this churn down the line or are we doomed forever?

For me it's a miracle each time my PC boots. We often forget the sheer marvel of modern computers and need to appreciate what we have. Remember Steve Jobs on stage showcasing how you could send an email with an iPhone. Back then it was amazing, but now it's common and we're all jaded about it. We need to recapture the joy of computing, not build large overarching abstractions.

First software ate the world. Now software is eating software too. My point is, what you write makes sense if the target isn't moving. Writing software will inevitably become more complex because the envelope is always being pushed.

What you say about needless complexity is a very valid point, but it's just growing pains imo.

There's a big leap from "a few people at work are overengineering things" to "we have screwed ourselves as software engineers". I don't think that you can generalize to the entire industry based on your experience.

To what degree is this valid logic?

Under what contexts does “reversion to the mean” apply?

Over what time frame?

The “mean” implies one dimension. What quantity are you referring to?