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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#61

Post by cottsak »

wellpast wrote: post #25

Being able to solve problems with true simplicity is a master’s skill. The skill to recognize simplicity and its value is a skill as well. 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 work…

that's why talking about the merits of simplicity is more of an art than something of utility to other engineers https://hammerproject.com/2023/07/28/complexity.html

it just isn't very appetising

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#62

Post by zozbot234 »

bluGill wrote: post #52

Engineer B who can get that over complex solution working is the person you will turn to when complexity is required for the problem. They have experience in getting it to work, and such they really are worth more. 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…

Not really, because even when complexity is required, the last thing you want is even more, unneeded complexity. There is no guarantee that the kind of complexity B brought to a problem is the exact same kind you're going to need somewhere else. It turns out that complexity is, shall we say, more complex than that.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#63

Post by esprehn »

codingdave wrote: post #2

Sure they do. You just need to spell it out in business terms, not tech terms: "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.

Those verbs (reduced, decreased, increased) all assume the situation was "bad" already. Avoiding that in the initial design is what's poorly rewarded.

Building a system that's fast on day one will not usually be rewarded as well as building a slow system and making it 80% faster.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#64

Post by nhayfield »

shafyy wrote: post #58
mattcollins wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, AI coding tools make it relatively easy to set and apply policies that can help with this sort of thing. I like to have something like the following in AGENTS.md: ## Guiding Principles - Optimise for long-term maintainability - KISS - YAGNI

Not sure if you're kidding or not, but to write great maintable code, you need a lot of understanding that a LLM just doesn't have, like history, business context, company culture etc. Also, I doubt that in it's training data it has a lot of good examples of great maintainable code to pull from.

He isn't kidding. I have a directive to write the shortest, least complicated, readable business code and it makes a huge difference

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#65

Post by yudhiyudhi »

shafyy wrote: post #58
mattcollins wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, AI coding tools make it relatively easy to set and apply policies that can help with this sort of thing. I like to have something like the following in AGENTS.md: ## Guiding Principles - Optimise for long-term maintainability - KISS - YAGNI

Not sure if you're kidding or not, but to write great maintable code, you need a lot of understanding that a LLM just doesn't have, like history, business context, company culture etc. Also, I doubt that in it's training data it has a lot of good examples of great maintainable code to pull from.

Neither do most humans writing such code, i have seen llms generate better code than 90% of coders I have seen in the last 20 years

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#66

Post by vrosas »

dalmo3 wrote: post #34

Long rant, but the author never defines what he means by "simple". He heavily hints at smaller changeset == simpler . 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’…

> shouldn’t we future-proof this?

The answer to this is almost always "NO" in my experience, because no one ever actually has good suggestions when it comes up. It's never "should we choose a scalable compute/database platform?" It's always "should we build a complex abstraction layer in case we want to use multiple blob storage systems that will only contain the lowest common denominator of features of both AND require constant maintenance AND have weird bugs and performance issues because I think I'm smarter than AWS/Google AND ALSO we have no plans to actually DO that?"

/I'm not bitter...

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#67

Post by drdrek »

It's not just that it looks good, there is constant pressure from other Engineers that we should "Do it right" and "Plan for the future" even if the future is murky and every design choice we take for scalability is probably just constraints that will hinder us if the requirements change.

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.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#68

Post by tripledry »

steveBK123 wrote: post #31
codingdave wrote: post #2

Sure they do. You just need to spell it out in business terms, not tech terms: "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.

> "Reduced incidents by 80%", "Decreased costs by 40%", "Increased performance by 33% while decreasing server footprint by 25%" My experience is no one really gets promoted/rewarded for these types of things or at least not beyond an initial one-off pat on the back. All anyone cares about is feature release velocity. If it's even possible to reduce incidents by 80% then either your org had a very high tolerance for b…

> All anyone cares about is feature release velocity.

And at the same time it's impossible to convince tech illiterate people that reducing complexity likely increases velocity.

Seemingly we only get budget to add, never to remove. Also for silver bullets, if Big Tech promises a [thing] you can pay for that magically resolves all your issues, management seems enchanted and throws money at it.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#70

Post by vrosas »

domk wrote: post #20

One of our interviews is a technical design question that asks the candidate to design a web-based system for public libraries. It explicitly tests for how simple they can keep it, starting at "a single small town library" scale and then changing the requirements to "every library in the country". The top ever performance was someone who answered that by estimating that even at max theoretical scale, all you need a m…

I have 100% failed interviews by giving that answer when their definition of scale was 10,000!!!! req/sec. Like sorry dude in 2026 that's not much different than 10 req/sec and my original design would work just fine... But that's what happens when your interviewer is a "senior" 24 year old just reading off the prompt.
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