Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity
Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity “Simplicity is a great virtue, but it requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate. And to make matters worse, complexity sells better.” — Edsger Dijkstra I think there’s something quietly screwing up a lot of engineering teams. In interviews, in promotion packets, in design reviews: the engineer who overbuilds gets a compelling narrative, but the one who ships the simplest thing that works gets… nothing. This isn’t intentional, of course. Nobody sits down and says, “let’s make sure the people who over-engineer things get promoted!” But that’s what can happen (and it has been, over and over again) when companies evaluate work incorrectly. Picture two engineers on the same team. Engineer A gets assigned a feature….
