I pondered for a while that FOMO and imposter syndrome are rampant
among junior software engineers as a cause of over-engineering. But my
few experiences as an SE manager tells a different story, anecdotally
at least; left to their own devices with time and space, the kids will
come up with astonishingly optimal, even elegant solutions.
Good, confident managers can also achieve the same outcome by being
very directive.
The sweetspot for catastrophe occurs when insecure developers led by
insecure SEMs get into a jazzhanded squee of trendy solutionism. You
get a conspiracy of avoidant mutual stroking, each trying not to
expose the other's incompetence.
Tangent: Is this really a 3 minute read for others? I could no way read this in 3 minutes and grasp it all. I would need at least 6-8 minutes. Am I doing something wrong?
I read it in about 1 minute. But that doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong necessarily! I have ADHD—which for me has a weird side benefit of recognizing information patterns I won’t find helpful and treating them as fields of grass rather than blades—and my brain filtered a lot of it out as “reductionist bullshit I hear incessantly”, so I mostly skimmed after I got the bent of the article.
This is not a judgment on you, or what you did, but I don't know if I'd define that as "reading." I did essentially the same thing you did, but I have always called it "skimming." With articles like this, I tend to skim first, to see if it's worth a deeper reading. to answer your parent comment, I could not have deeply read this post in only 3 mins. It likely would have taken 5 or more.
Good, confident managers can also achieve the same outcome by being very directive.
The sweetspot for catastrophe occurs when insecure developers led by insecure SEMs get into a jazzhanded squee of trendy solutionism. You get a conspiracy of avoidant mutual stroking, each trying not to expose the other's incompetence.