[crate_barre]

If you find yourself over-engineering due to stuff you think you should be doing, things that ‘real developers’ do, understand you are vulnerable to being pimped. It’s no different than anyone else handing over their common sense and self worth in pursuit of an abstract form of validation (so abstract that you can internalize the validation cycle even in the absence of a physical superior).

If you find yourself defending your bad over-engineering and those that sold you the lifestyle, understand you are fully pimped and are now defending the pimp, even to your own detriment.

Happens to all of us from time to time, snap out of it. Don’t get pimped by ‘faangs’ or ‘notable person of interest’. Don’t listen to everything I said either, lest you want to get pimped by me.

Unless you can wholeheartedly make an objective argument for why you used a pattern, a tech stack, a process, in plain simple words, sans ‘that’s how the big boys do it’, sans ‘this makes me a real developer’, you are simply pimped and spewing out pimped out thoughts of your overlord pimps. Be ready to be wrong and backtrack and own the mistake and correct course, but don’t you dare hold on to it, or I’ll probe to see who is pimping you out.

I was never more free from my overlord developer pimps until the day I realized they evangelized impractical solutions. Never hoe’ing for anyone ever again.

[crispyambulance]

I share this sentiment BUT...

It's also important to try stuff out, fail, recover, and try again. That "Code Complexity vs. Experience" graph in the article is not completely a joke. Very few people can tunnel through the complexity hump without years of failures and successes behind them. Moreover, you might not have a choice.

You might find yourself dropped into an obstacle course of complexity that other people created and that you have to keep running following their arcane patterns and practices-- while at the same time implementing new features and refactoring it into something workable before it becomes completely intractable. I think almost everyone faces this problem (except for maybe the most orderly and elite workplaces?).

[crate_barre]

My message was mostly for those that hide behind mistakes via an appeal to authority. Trying new things is a risk, which is fine, but to own the the success of the risk means you must also pay the collateral of owning the failure. The message is for those who don’t put up the collateral and hide behind ‘this is what everyone(the pros /sarcasm) is doing’ or ‘this is how it’s done’, and never reflect objectively.

No one would argue against trying things, it’s where all creativity and innovation comes from. I argue against dysfunction, the whole ‘the ship is not sinking’, when in fact it is.

Anyway, perhaps I’m speaking too personally, because I am on a literal Titanic right now, so apologies for that.

[crispyambulance]

Yep, also on a Titanic myself, rearranging the deck chairs (because I have to!).