alt Hacker NewsNobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity
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AI coding tools are making this problem worse in a subtle way. When an agent can generate a "scalable event-driven architecture" in 5 minutes, the build cost of complexity drops to near zero. But the maintenance cost doesn't.
So now you get Engineer B's output even faster, with even more impressive-sounding abstractions, and the promotion packet writes itself in minutes too. Meanwhile the actual cost - debugging, onboarding, incident response at 3am - stays exactly the same or gets worse, because now nobody fully understands what was generated.
The real test for simplicity has always been: can the next person who touches this code understand it without asking you? AI-generated complexity fails that test spectacularly.
Yup.
As a manager, I preferred engineers that delivered simpler code, but I also ran a team of experienced, high-functioning coders. I suspect teams with many less-experienced people get The Parable of The Toaster[0].
Ironically, this article is "over simplifying" the problem.
In the FAANGs I've worked at, engineers who come from scrappy companies and implement hacks (Like the example of emailing spreadsheets around) undermine the business and will cost the productivity of thousands of people.
However, at the startups I've worked at, the folks from big companies that try to implement a super complex thing (e.g. exotic databases, overly ambitious infrastructure) The results are equally catastrophic for a company attempting to bootstrap when the complexity is so far removed from their core business.
What makes an experienced engineer is recognizing both states, understanding what works where and making the right trade-offs, usually from experience you can't fake your way through. I've seen a lot of projects that took 10-20 engineers 18 months to so we could sell something that landed a $100M contract with a customer. You see that enough times and you won't bias as hard against complexity. But of course it's situation dependent, like anything.
I worked at Amazon 2005-2008 as a Software Dev Engineer. To hammer home company culture, there were two awards which could be awarded at the Quarterly All-hands meeting * The "Just Do It" Award which recognized someone just fixing some obvious problem at was in front of them but not responsibility * The "Door Desk" Award for frugality, named in honour of the basic door-frame-four-leg desk everyone worked on.
In many ways, the Door Desk award was for simplicity. I remember, one time, someone got an award for getting rid of some dumb operations room with some big unused LCD TVs. When you won these awards, you rarely got any kind of reward. It was just acknowledgement at the meeting. But that time, they literally gave the guy the TVs.
Sure they do. You just need to spell it out in business terms, not tech terms:
"Reduced incidents by 80%", "Decreased costs by 40%", "Increased performance by 33% while decreasing server footprint by 25%"
Simplicity for its own sake is not valued. The results of simplicity are highly valued.
I'd add one point to this, as someone who voraciously fights against complexity at every turn, more and more as I get older. I've experienced times where leadership/management will assume that you're fighting against the complex solution simply because you don't grasp or understand it. It's irritating at best.
The longest lived projects and solutions I've worked on have always been the simplest, easiest to replace solutions. Often derived from simple tests scenarios or solutions that just work and get shifted over without much re-work.
What's somewhat funny, with this is that AI code assistants have actually helped a lot with continuing this approach for me... I can create a stand alone solution to work on a library or component, work through the problems, then copy the component/library into the actual work project it was for. I'm in a really locked down internalized environment, so using AI for component dev is on my own hardware... but the resulting work is a piece that can be brought in as-is. No exposure of internal data/resources.
I don't think I'll have a level of trust to "one-shot" or vibe code solutions from AI, but leveraging the ability to spin up a project as a sample to test a component/library is pretty great to say the least.
The example he gave where each dev gets a single feature done seems to skip over the opportunity that Dev A has - after she spends only "a couple days" on that feature to ship a simple solution, she now has the rest of that week to do another feature, and another... in fact, she could probably get 6 features done in the time that Mr. Complexity took to do his one feature (3 weeks in the straw-man example). Then the promo packet looks much better for Dev A - while it says "implemented feature X", it also says "implemented feature A, feature B, feature C...". Doesn't that seem more attractive?
Slightly related: I've noticed that there are lots of "ideas guys" (yes, guys) in our field who love to bloviate, and maybe even accomplish some stuff that looks really good. I have made a career out of just putting my head down and getting shit done. I may not have grand design ideas, and in fact have had to unlearn the "fact" that you need to come up with, and implement, Big Ideas. In my experience, people who "get shit done" may not get fancy awards, but their work is recognized and rewarded.
One of our interviews is a technical design question that asks the candidate to design a web-based system for public libraries. It explicitly tests for how simple they can keep it, starting at "a single small town library" scale and then changing the requirements to "every library in the country". The top ever performance was someone who answered that by estimating that even at max theoretical scale, all you need a medium sized server and Postgres.
I feel like the article is conflating simplicity with minimalism. Just doing the minimum of whats asked isn’t in itself enough to differentiate great vs ok.
Simplicity is worth recognizing only when the person started with a complex problem and ended up with a relatively simpler solution.
For a straightforward ask you will have people who will just build a hut and another will build a campus, who is right really depends on many factors and time.
I forget who said it, but it seems that AI is basically an amplifier of the talents (or lack of them) of whoever is wielding the tool.
In the hands of an experienced developer/designer, AI will help them achieve a good result faster.
In the hands of someone inexperienced, out of their depth, AI will just help them create a mess faster, and without the skill to assess what's been generated they may not even know it.
People get promoted for making their boss look good.
P.S. I know this sounds obvious, but I was a slow learner.
Simplicity is hard. Mark Twain's 'I would have written less had I had more time' at the end of a letter comes to mind.
Software dev's tendency to build castles is great for technical managers who want to own complex systems to gain organizational leverage. Worse is better in this context. Even when it makes people who understand cringe.
You would think that things not breaking should be career-positive for SysAdmins, SREs, and DevOps engineers in a way it cannot be for software devs. But even there simplicity is hard and not really rewarded.
Unix philosophy got this right 50 years ago — small tools, composability, do one thing well. Unix reimagined for AI is my attempt to change that.
Relatedly, I'm periodically thinking about the issue of people who prevent problems not being rewarded as much as those who become "heroes" for resolving avoidable situations
I guess it may be important to underscore the value that simplicity provides over needless complexity or to sell people on the value of problems prevented rather than preventable catastrophes that were dealt with
Maybe we could encourage a culture of patting people on the back for maintaining reliable "boring" systems
Some people also crave "drama" so there might be a way to frame "boring reliability" as some kind of "epic daily maintenance struggle that was successfully navigated"
The name of the game is framing. You don't talk about simplicity, because most people don't really understand what simplicity is. They falsely equate it to easy.
Instead you talk about how you complete all your tasks and have so much bandwidth remaining compared to all your peers, the beneficial results of simplicity. Being severely under used while demonstrating the ability to do 2x-10x more work than everybody else is what gets you promoted.
In this vein simplicity is like hard work. Nobody gives a shit about hard work either. Actually, if all you have to show is how hard you work you are a liability. Instead its all about how little you work provided and that you accomplish the same, or more, than everybody else.
Long rant, but the author never defines what he means by "simple". He heavily hints at smaller changeset == simpler.
Too often the smallest changeset is, yes, simple, but totally unaware of the surrounding context, breaks expectations and conventions, causes race conditions, etc.
The good bit in tfa is near the end:
> when someone asks “shouldn’t we future-proof this?”, don’t just cave and go add layers. Try: “Here’s what it would take to add that later if we need it, and here’s what it costs us to add it now. I think we wait.” You’re not pushing back, but showing you’ve done your homework. You considered the complexity and chose not to take it on.
I actually got a job for deleting code. I was fixing a problem on a contract and noticed that I could fix the problem by getting rid of the section that contained the problem. The functionality could be provided in a much simpler way. Later the company created a position and I was given first refusal before they interviewed anyone.
It was a 8 bit embedded application in something like 10k of code. When I left I generated a short and clear explanation of why what I had done was awesome in terms of their future business ... because that is what you have to do if you work contracts. Which is the real message of the article. You have to write things up.
In my team, I've been working to help everyone do a task that's necessary, but because it was too difficult, people bypassed it. Over time, I made it simpler, others are joining to make it even simpler, but in the process, I'm not doing as many "feature tasks" as I could. I joke that people are mad at me every day, but grateful every week and month.
I had to stop trying to prove myself to the company. I have already done that when y'all interviewed me. Now I do what's best for everyone, and I want the company to prove to me that it deserves people who do the right thing despite the processes not valuing it. If it does not, I have enough resources to spend some time on the projects I cared about most.
This mentality gave me peace of mind and helped many people in partner teams go faster and with higher quality.
Management still does not openly appreciate it, but it shows in how they interact with me. Like when you learn to talk to your parents as equals. It's unexpected for them, but they quickly embrace the new interaction and they love it much more than the one before.
Dijkstra understood it 50 years ago, and again 26 years ago [1]. Nothing changes. Malpractice just propagate and there are zero incentives to build simple, small, and maintainable software. If the company you work for just push for unnecessary complexity, get out of there! Don't fold!
> In design reviews, when someone asks “shouldn’t we future-proof this?”, don’t just cave and go add layers.
In fact, simplicity often is the best future-proofing. Complex designs come with maintenance costs, so simple designs are inherently more robust to reorgs, shifted priorities, and team downsizing.
This has been a thought theme throughout my career and have a good set of scenarios I never ended up publishing.
It's not just the most "elaborate system". The same thing happens in so many other ways. For example a good/simple solution is one and done. Whereas a complex one will be an interminable cause of indirect issued down the road. With the second engineer being the one fixing them.
Then there's another pattern of the 10x (not the case with all 10x-ers) seeding or asked to "fix" other projects, then moving on to the next, leaving all the debt to the team.
It's really an amazing dynamic that can be studied from a game theoretical perspective. It's perhaps one of the adjacent behaviors that support the Gervais principle.
It's also likely going to be over soon, now that AI is normalizing a lot of this work.
Ah, but it's worse than this. The truly ambitious ladder climber creates not just unnecessarily complicated abstractions, but organizations. Processes for people to follow. Infrastructure for people to maintain. Committees to vet changes. Standing meetings.
Spitting facts, here.
I built a showback model at a prior org. Re-used shelfware for the POC, did the research on granular costs for storage, compute, real estate, electricity, HVAC maintenance, hardware amortization, the whole deal. Could tell you down to the penny how much a given estate cost on-prem.
Simple. Elegant. $0 in spend to get running in production, modest spend to expand into public cloud (licensing, mainly). Went absolutely nowhere.
Got RIFed. On the way out the door, I hear a whole-ass team did the same thing, using additional budget, with lower confidence results. The biggest difference of all? My model gave you the actual cost in local currency, theirs gave you an imagined score.
The complexity (cost of a team, unnecessary scoring) was rewarded, not the simplicity.
The example in the story seems, if I may, "too simple."
Rarely have I seen an actually straightforward, simple feature that can be done in a day used as the basis to spin up a 3-week mini-project with a complicated new architecure.
What happens is a complicated-sounding feature is requested, and some devs will just take it literally and implement it, maybe along with some amount of "future-proofing" that logically follows because the spec is poorly scoped.
Other devs will spend some time thinking about it, realize that there is a really a simple requirement at the core of the request, and it only sounds complex because it was vaguely specified (or maybe these days an LLM was used to write the spec, and its vomit was copy-pasted verbatim). They just implement the simple thing that is the actual need.
This is one place where the agile/scrum practice of planning poker can help. You get a few smart people in a room, and discuss the story and its requirements. Hopefully someone will throw out a low number of points and say "isn't this simply asking for..."
Over my career, most of the complicated code I have written is no longer running. What is still running after 10 years? Postgres (or more broadly, a relational database). Fad frameworks or architectures come and go pretty quickly, they don't end up working as advertised, and it's on to the next thing. I no longer want to spend time in this hamster wheel churning out complicated code that will only end up as next year's tech debt.
>I think there’s something quietly screwing up a lot of engineering teams. In interviews, in promotion packets, in design reviews: the engineer who overbuilds gets a compelling narrative, but the one who ships the simplest thing that works gets… nothing.
I got emotional reading this. This is way too real.
In full-time employment this is sad but true. There is a way out of this toxic loop however.
As a consultant/contractor I always evangelise simplification and modelling problems from first principles. I jump between companies every 6-12 months, cleaning up after years of complexity-driven development, or outright designing robust systems that anybody (not just the author) can maintain and extend.
This level of honesty helps you build a reputation. I am never short for work. I also bill more than I could ever as a full-time engineer based in Europe.
Actually I have seen successful promotion packets based on elimination of complexity. When maintenance of a complex system becomes such a burden that even a director is aware of it, "eliminating toil" is a staff level skill.
More than once I have seen the same project yield two separate promotions, for creating it and deleting it. In particular this happens when the timescale of projects is longer than a single engineer's tenure on a given team.
But yes, avoiding complexity is rarely rewarded. The only way in which it helps you get promoted is that each simple thing takes less time and breaks less often, so you actually get more done.
There is a balancing point.
At core, complexity is derived from discovery of demand within those pesky complex humans.
Simplicity is the mechanism of finding common pathways within the mess of complexity of a product.
the tragedy is that simplicity is very expensive and beyond most organizations ability to support (especially since it can slow down demand discovery), and this is one of the allures of big tech for me. I was greatly rewarded and promoted for achieving simplicity within infrastructure.
That article made me chuckle.
I'm currently building a full-blown OpenAPI toolchain at work, where the OpenAPI document itself is the AST. It contains passes for reference inlining, document merging, JSON Schema validation, C++ code generation and has further plans for data model bindings, HTML5 UI...
Why? Because I'm working on a new embedded system which has a data model so complex, it blew past 10k lines of OpenAPI specifications with no end in sight. I said "ain't no way we're implementing this by hand" and embarked on the mother of all yak shavings.
I want all of the boilerplate/glue code derived from a single source of truth: base C++ data classes, data model bindings, configuration management, change notifications, REST API, state replication for device twins and more. That way we can focus on the domain logic instead, which is already plenty complex on its own.
I'm not designing all of this to be simple to develop. I'm designing it so that it's simple for the developers. Even with the incomplete prototype I have currently, the team is already sold ("you mean I just write the REST API specification and it generates all of the C++ classes for me to inherit?"). The roadmap of features for that toolchain is defined, clear and purposeful: to delete mountains of menial, bug-prone source code before it is ever written by hand.
Sometimes, it takes complexity to deliver simplicity. The trick is to nail the abstractions in-between.
This is the norm at large tech companies and, IMO, a huge problem and major detriment to productivity within organizations as the cost of that added complexity is paid by everyone.
BUT, at least very occasionally I have seen people get promoted for simplicity, I've even successfully made the case myself. With a problem that was itself so complex that it was causing fires on a regular basis, and staff & principal engineers didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. When a senior eng spent a couple of weeks thinking about the problem and eventually figured out a way to reframe it and simplify the solution, melting away months of work, making the promo case was actually quite easy.
The problem is, the opportunities to burn down complexity like that don't present themselves nearly as often as the opportunities to overcomplicate a thing, which are pretty much unbounded.
There's a related dynamic that I don't see discussed enough: simplicity is also harder to defend in design reviews because it looks like you didn't consider the edge cases. When someone proposes a three-table schema, the immediate question is "but what about X?" and the simple answer — "we handle X when X actually happens" — sounds like hand-waving compared to someone showing an elaborate diagram that accounts for every hypothetical scenario.
The irony is that the elaborate design usually handles those hypotheticals incorrectly anyway, because you can't predict real requirements from imagination. The simple version gets modified when real feedback arrives, and the modifications are cheaper because there's less architecture to work around.
Quite the opposite -- you get promoted for complexity and inefficiency, and pretending like you are the only SME who can handle it, thus creating a dependency between you and your manager. A good technical manager can see this coming a mile away. Bad ones don't but it costs the company.
The sad thing is that it is common to get fired when you make things better bc then your work is perceived as "done" and your skills are no longer necessary. There are countless IT job stories where someone delivers a technical solution that saves a company a ton of money or generates revenue, then they get fired bc the solution has been delivered and an off shore team has been hired to maintain the work.
Big corps suck.
Edit -- reading some the responses here on this topic and they are...eye-opening and depressing.
> Now, promotion time comes around. Engineer B’s work practically writes itself into a promotion packet: “Designed and implemented a scalable event-driven architecture, introduced a reusable abstraction layer adopted by multiple teams, and built a configuration framework enabling future extensibility.” That practically screams Staff+.
> But for Engineer A’s work, there’s almost nothing to say. “Implemented feature X.” Three words. Her work was better. But it’s invisible because of how simple she made it look. You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.
Well, Engineer A's manager should help her writing a better version of her output. It's not easy, but it's their work. And if this simpler solution was actually better for the company, it should be highlighted how in terms that make sense for the business. I might be naive and too optimistic but good engineers with decent enough managers will stand out in the long run. That doesn't exclude that a few "bad" engineers can game their way up at the same time, even in functional organizations. though.
We've had an interesting experience on the interviewing side of this. Asking a system design question and getting answers involving multiple layers of caching, pub/sub, event-driven whatever/etc.. when the real answer is to just use postgres. It handles the scale we're asking about. We know it, as that's what we use internally.
I've only worked at my startup so I can't comment on scale elsewhere, but if our simple architecture can handle 30k requests per second, I think it can handle most other companies scale too.
That is very true. For whatever reasons - the bigger the company, the more unjustified complexity it cripples itself with without being aware about it.
Also survivorship bias is a very real thing (problem prevented is ignored, while problem solved is appreciated regardless of who and why caused it).
There are two ways of constructing software: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
— C. A. R. Hoare
This is not entirely true. In an environment driven by business stakeholders, the engineer who ships features quickly, and that break rarely in production, will be greatly appreciated. The engineer who takes weeks to over-engineer a simple feature, which then runs into unexpected side issues in production, much less so.
The environment where the over-engineer tends to be promoted is one where the engineering department is (too) far separated from where the end users are. Think of very large organizations with walled departments, or organizations where there simply is not enough to do so engineers start to build stuff to fight non existing issues.
I have a story about this; People had an HSM (in USB key form) which needed to be shared. The question came to create some elaborate piece of software for lending to prevent people from accidentally leaving it in their pockets and accidentally going home with it (which had happened a couple of times).
Instead I went to the hardware store across the street and bought the biggest (and cheapest) screwdriver I could find and attached it with some cord to the HSM. They never lost it afterwards.
Extends to the extreme levels of SaaS-ification of fairly basic app functionality as well.
It's often simpler to build something you know than to integrate a 3rd party service, but it's highly frowned upon by a lot of devs and management.
Auth and analytics are things I'm thinking of - we have good tools to build these in-house. Also just running a database - never seen so many people afraid of installing postgres and a cronjob to back it up.
The structural problem is that simplicity accrues value slowly and diffusely, while complexity delivers visible credit immediately to whoever built it. The person who adds the abstraction layer gets the PR merged and the ticket closed. The person who deletes it six months later gets... a smaller diff and a shrug.
I've noticed the incentive breaks down even further when you consider that simplicity often means saying no upfront, which requires correctly predicting future maintenance costs that nobody has experienced yet. Complexity requires no such foresight. You just build the thing someone asked for.
The orgs where I've seen this actually work had explicit "deleted lines" culture, where removing code was celebrated as loudly as shipping features. Not many places do that. Most treat a 2000-line deletion PR with the same energy as taking out the trash.
Maybe not promoted, but certainly hired, as a consultant.
Most of my engagements consisted of replacing politics-driven complications with simple solutions.
The bigger problem was first quietly showing all the affected people other interesting things that needed doing so they would let go.
And TBH, the simple stuff lasted the longest because it harder to misunderstand or misrepresent.
In larger systems, what looks like “overengineering” can be deliberate risk management. In my experience, senior engineers do get promoted for simplicity but only when they can articulate the trade-offs and the future costs they are avoiding.
You need the tension between both, or else either approach at most levels of systems, whether its an app or a corporation, tends to lead to toxic failures modes.
It could be something overbuilt, large organization structures. Brittle solutions that are highly performant until they break. Or products/offerings that don't grow for similar reasons, simpler-is-better, don't compete with yourself. Or those that grow the wrong way-- too many, much to manage, frailty through complexity, sku confusion.
Alternatively, things that are allowed to grow with some leeway, some caution, and then pruned back.
There's failure modes in any of these but the one I see most often is overreaching concern for any single one.
Simplicity can be a powerful defence against complexity. When there are many ways something can go wrong.
Rather than trying to anticipate all the different failure modes one tries at first just to handle fact of failure itself, assuming there's no remediation.
If there's a way to make sure the worst case isn't terrible in some simple way then you do that first - like making a backup file or tr4ying to keep APIs idempotent so you can recover from issues and so on.
Maybe I am naive but I still believe that simplicity leads to personal wins in the long run. Having simpler system designs lead to velocity and eventually you become known as the "team that can deliver".
Shipping a button in 2026… <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE9W9Ghe4Jk>
> Picture two engineers on the same team. Engineer A gets assigned a feature. She looks at the problem, considers a few options, and picks the simplest. A straightforward implementation, maybe 50 lines of code. Easy to read, easy to test, easy for the next person to pick up. It works. She ships it in a couple of days and moves on.
> Engineer B gets a similar feature. He also looks at the problem, but he sees an opportunity to build something more “robust.” He introduces a new abstraction layer, creates a pub/sub system for communication between components, adds a configuration framework so the feature is “extensible” for future use cases. It takes three weeks. There are multiple PRs. Lots of excited emojis when he shares the document explaining all of this.
So in this scenario two solutions are produced: Fast to develop but probably brittle (it is not described as robust, but it is described as easy to change), slow to develop but not brittle (but perhaps too complex and likely hard to change).
Both fucked up. Engineer A stopped too soon, and Engineer B built too much up before any value was realized.
You want Engineer C: Makes the fast solution that gives you feedback (is the feature worth pushing further? do users want/need it?), and continues to produce a more robust solution that won't crap the bed.
Engineer A is a potential chaos agent, tossing out and abandoning work too soon. Engineer B is a bottleneck who will waste weeks or months producing invalid solutions.
Go for the middle path.
The article's point is sound, but its missing a key component. People who build simpler systems are capable of getting more done - the build takes less, the maintenance takes less, etc. So when the engineer choosing simplicity is looking to get promoted they might have 3 or 4 bullet points to their name instead of 1.
Of course, over-simplification is the wrong decision some times, the same as abstraction and complexity is the wrong decision some times...
Your shortcut for promotion is generally building value for the company, but people need to remember that promotions support the business and they aren't free to the company.
This is playing out in real time with AI. Someone uses ChatGPT to compress weeks of work into hours, and the organizational response isn't "great, let's scale this" -- it's panic about what it means for headcount and hierarchy.
There's a short film making the rounds that captures this perfectly -- an employee uses AI to generate the quarterly results his whole department was working on, and instead of being promoted, he gets fired: https://youtu.be/O5FFkHUdKyE
The simplicity penalty is even worse when the simplification comes from AI. It's not just "you made us look bad" -- it's "you made our entire team look unnecessary."
I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something?
I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build.
I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was.