| Okay, I'll bite. > Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt [sic] worked at scale I've worked in startups and large tech organizations over decades and indeed, there are definitely some problems in those places that are hard. That said, in my opinion, the majority of technical solutions were over engineered and mostly waste. Much simpler, more reliable, more efficient solutions were available, but inappropriately dismissed. My team was able to demonstrate this by producing a much simpler system, deploying it and delivering it to many millions of people, every day. Chesterton's fence is great in some contexts, especially politics, but the vast majority of software is so poorly made, it rarely applies IMO. |
I also worked on some quite large organizations with quite large services that would easily take 10x to 50x the amount of time to ship if they were a smaller org.
Most of the time people were mistaking complexity caused by bad decisions (tech or otherwise) with "domain complexity" and "edge cases" and refusing to acknowledge that things are now harder because of those decisions. Just changing the point of view makes it simple again, but then you run into internal politics.
With microservices especially, the irony was that it was mostly the decisions justified as being done to "save time in the future" that ended up generating the most amount of future work, and in a few cases even problems around compliance and data sovereignty.