| HN Mirror

The last decade in tech has shown that productivity does not matter most and I'm not sure the pendulum is swinging back (yet?). The only time productivity matters most is maybe small, bootstrapped businesses where cash isn't infinite and actual value delivered is what matters. In fact, the company behind this is Basecamp which is almost an outlier in tech at this point, as they're one of the few out there that actually makes its $$$ by selling products/services people pay money for, as opposed to endless VC money or acquisitions.

When it comes to VC-funded crap or big legacy enterprise trying to "modernise" itself, over-engineering allows grifters to twist the situation for their own personal gain. The business problem the tech is supposed to solve often warrants a simple solution, but why would someone solve it with a simple solution and 3 people when they can bring Kubernetes, microservices, "service mesh", blockchain and multiple programming languages to the mix and suddenly become an "engineering manager" managing 30 people, put big words on their resumes and speak at conferences about how they solve big (self-inflicted, as a side-effect of the overengineering) problems where more of their peers (either new and genuinely believing this is the proper way to do things - like I once was - or experienced enough to know this is BS but support it as it paves the way for their own career) encourage them?

This happens at multiple levels too, it's not just developers or would-be engineering managers. The funding side of things is also broken in the sense that you'll attract more investors and raise more money (some of which you'll keep in your pocket as salary, even if the company folds in the end) if you throw big words and pitch an over-engineered solutions such as blockchain as opposed to a simple and proven one (even though the latter is more likely to actually pay off).