[dazzawazza]

My constant battle in the last 15 years (of 30 years of development) has been the unending torrent of completely unneccesary complexity that teams inflict on themselves. I feel it's often just to pad their CVs or because the current *perfectly usable* stack is boring.

Limiting complexity to where it's *really* needed is the hidden magic of a great leader in my opinion. A great engineer knows how to wall that complexity off from the rest of the system as well because complexity spreads like cancer through a codebase.

I've never been a TD but I can imagine your pain.

[tarsinge]

Everybody is incentived to use the tools FAANG+ are using even if completely unnecessary, ie follow fashion. Developers for Resume Driven Development, and execs because it reassure investors and is good for marketing. The industry doesn’t reward smart engineering choices.

[stavros]

Hey, at least I managed to consolidate all our services into a monolith, which developers ended up really liking, and it works well for us.

One battle at a time, I guess, but the "let's simplify the frontend" effort is meeting much more resistance from people who are interested in the frontend having a lot of state.

[Frost1x]

Part of the issue in the complexity battle is competition and levels of expectations from features. Non technical decision makers (and there are lots of them, I’d say most of them) see services from Facebook, Google, etc. and have the same level of feature expectations in their one off small app. They have no clue how much effort exists behind it to maintain what seems simple and now even standard (across large services).

Ultimately they come up with ideas and write feature requirements (indirectly) based around this premise with their shoestring budget and ad hoc team. And we end up in a world with not so well developed applications attempting to create similar features to competitors in budget which leads to a lot of corner cutting and barely working implementations with no thought towards long term maintenance requirements. At least, this has been mostly my experience.

There are of course those out there simply bored with life who want to build unnecessary complexity because they have to be doing something (heaven forbid there be idle time in any work environment either from their own pressure and/or internal organizational pressures) and they start trying to be clever or skill up to some wider marketable skillset (e.g. react).

It’s really business environments that create this sort of complexity requirement from needless feature requests to wide adoption of specific trendy skills in their stack to make hiring easier/cheaper, etc.