[hinkley]

> they were struggling to find engineers that the CTO thought were smart enough.

If you have to find the smartest people to keep the wheels on, you’ve already lost.

Disdain for the bell curve is the fastest way to get overengineering. Very few things have to be rocket science to create a good company. Everything else should be dead simple so that anyone can work on it. That also means you have to compartmentalize the hard bits so they don’t leak across the entire codebase.

But some people get bored with mundane code and will make things interesting by replacing a boring task with an exciting one. It’s part of the Curse of Knowledge. You can’t run a company like an action movie. Everyone gets burnt out.