[seahawks78]

> "This is just one of the ways an unprincipled "builder culture" can backfire, particularly if you have people running the show who have no problem putting their own gains ahead of the company. They'll push all kinds of garbage if it makes them hit their goals and get a bigger bonus, a promotion, or some kind of shiny new position."

In lots of places I have worked there is a particular term that is often used to precisely describe this situation, it is called POA aka "Promotion Oriented Architecture". In POA, you deliberately add a lot of accidental complexity to come up with a fiendishly complicated solution to a relatively simple problem. In short, the complexity stems from the solution space rather than the problem space.