Ask the person to implement "Hello world" and then count the lines of code, number of classes, inheritance depth, number of external dependencies, etc.
Thats plain java-cism there.
Ask HN: Code examples to find out if a person is addicted to “overengineering”
51–52 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: Code examples to find out if a person is addicted to “overengineering”
#52How can you be so sure you aren't underengineering, and this person you know is actually planning ahead wisely?
Personally I feel as if underengineering is less of a problem than overengineering. I've seen both in real life scenarios and usually you just throw the underegineered code away and start over with knowledge gained from the previous solution. And the reason you can do that is because you usually realize that you have an underengineered solution fairly early.
A truly underengineered solution doesn't provide mechanisms to allow it to be refactored or deleted.