Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#2I was promoted for getting rid of multiple services in favor of a small compact implementation.
I also promote and advocate for people who push for simple solutions with as little infrastructure as possible.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#3In my experience this doesn't happen as often as some people like to state. It tends to be less experienced, more junior, engineers that propose complex solutions, and more experienced engineers are the ones driving simplicity – both because they've been burned by complexity and value the simplicity more, and because they have the experience to clarify and distil problems down enough to get to the simplest solutions.
I think it's easy to state this sort of opinion, it sounds good on the surface, but I don't feel it stands up to scrutiny. I'd like to see some evidence or studies done to see if this is actually a trend.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#4Simplicity is great but it is orthogonal to features. One could add many simple features and combine them e. g. the UNIX pipe philosophy, but it still adds a cognitive load. I failed to memorise awk, so I worked around it by simply using ruby as surrogate. And I still add "actionable-code" to do specific tasks, all in an attempt to avoid having to burden my weak brain with hard-to-memorize tokens and sigils. I kind of think in terms of the computer as a DSL wrapper, but with a more flexible syntax than the traditional bash/shell script syntax (or awk or perl or sed; I do actually use sed since it is so convenient but I am not the biggest fan of it either).
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#5Selling your work is distinct from simplicity. Despite the headline, the article is mostly arguing that how well you promote your work is the most important metric when it comes to promotions. This jives with my personal experience & advice from managers.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#6"Identified and implemented a streamlined solution that delivered the required functionality in approximately 50 lines of code, prioritizing clarity, maintainability, and operational efficiency. Proactively evaluated alternative approaches and intentionally avoided unnecessary architectural complexity, reducing long-term maintenance overhead and accelerating delivery timelines. Demonstrated strong engineering judgment by aligning implementation scope with business needs while preserving flexibility for future iteration."
This isn't an engineering problem, it's a sales problem.
Also, you don't even have to be good at this stuff anymore. Any management nitwit would eat that up on a performance eval, and I had GPT write it for me.
Prompt: "Write up the most corporate self eval possible for someone who identified a simple solution in only 50 lines of code, instead of creating an over architecture mess. Keep it to just three sentences"
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#7Because unfortunately, someone proposing simplicity somehow means that it threatens another person's job security, which is quite frankly pathetic, even though it can lead to saving the business money and time.
The only valid excuse is whether the risk is worth it vs the potential gains. But the solutions that I prefer are the ones that offer minimal changes with massive gains rather than co-ordinating with hundreds of teams for years over an unrelated change.
If you have to do the latter for a tiny code change, then the architecture was most certainly built on a bad foundation, riddled with hundreds of brittle moving part waiting for an incident.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#8I launched a technical feature on Amazon's retail platform that is responsible for 9 figures worth of revenue. When I launched it, it had no infrastructure. It was a collection of small changes across every core platform (Detail Page, Cart, Checkout, etc).
At first people were like "Well, you didn't do much" but when they saw the value things changed drastically. It's a bit of marketing you have to do to help bring people along.
Often perceived impact is correlated with complexity, sadly.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#9In my experience this doesn't happen as often as some people like to state. It tends to be less experienced, more junior, engineers that propose complex solutions, and more experienced engineers are the ones driving simplicity – both because they've been burned by complexity and value the simplicity more, and because they have the experience to clarify and distil problems down enough to get to the simplest solutions.…
I haven't worked at that many companies to have an informed opinion, but I've certainly been at a couple of places where smart people went along with ridiculous complexity, but part of the reason was there was already a hugely complicated mess with way too many people working on it for a simple solution to be politically feasible.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#10Excellent article. It's even worse for people who can build and run small/medium products end-to-end (coding, infra, handling prospects and customers directly, being mindful of costs) and are made to report to engineering managers, who clearly understand only the coding part.