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Hacker News
I think over-complicated and over-engineered are not the same thing.
Over-complicated is adding too many features, too much mechanism, too many moving parts. Over-engineering is far exceeding the requirements in an unhelpful way. For example: build me a treehouse. Said treehouse could probably be made of wood. If you made it out of concrete and steel, it might be a heck of a lot stronger and last a heck of a lot longer, without being more complicated (just more expensive). Too strong is over-engineered. If you made a treehouse with 13 bedrooms and an elevator, glass windows, solar power, and running water, that's overcomplicated.
by titzer
The caveat here is, as TFA states, is that you need to have "every constraint on the table". And that is almost never the case. Unless you create something in a mature domain, where everything has already been explored, you _won't know_ what the constraints are.
You can spend three months in whiteboard sessions planning out the perfect solution, and then your plan falls apart the second you start implementing, because the real world imposes constraints on you that were practically impossible to know a priori. Not theoretically impossible, mind you. If you'd been smart enough and spent enough time thinking about it, you would have thought of them. But you aren't smart enough, and you don't have the time. Those are some other constraints that the universe puts on you.
by laszlojamf
"With one big caveat: you need a very clear set of requirements"
Most new product launches are an exercise in figuring out what the product requirements should be through trial and error (really: through ongoing dialogue with your users). Even mature products can have requirements change over time as the market changes.
I think internalizing this reality is why most senior engineers who work in domains that touch the messy real world will reflexively push back against perfectionism.
by mlinsey
I believe perfection is a dirty word because it has a pernicious effect on the human mind.
Striving towards perfection too often leads to yes over-engineering but I think more importantly it also: leads to way too much bike shedding due to the need to be perfect and allot of even emotional baggage when we don't make that perfect things.
Even the author admits that their definition of perfect can only arise with stringent requirements and I'll take it a step further, maybe it was perfect for that problem at that time but guess what change happens all the time, and as architects we have to think about future problems as much as current ones. With that in mind I think that having something that is good in many scenarios is better than the thing that is perfect in the scenario you start in.
I don't share the definition of over engineering.
As engineering is the act of solving technical problems, over engineering is about putting too much engineering effort on aspects, features or products that don't have a linear payoff to the budget spent.
E.g. I worked in a company that was obsessed with unit test coverage metrics and the effort of maintaining the test suite was considerably biting in the ability to move the product. The ratio was 25% of product and 75% of unit tests.
And the payoff was small if not even negative, impacted morale, productivity and actively pushed back against refactors, because any large refactor was met with a disproportionate effort in unit test rewriting. Let alone the fact that as you were mocking external dependencies, and the mocks costed engineering effort and internals digging, it also suppressed work to keep it up to date.
I never got to convince the org to shift focus on E2E testing, which answered the real questions: does the product make money and works as expected. Uni test had to be used when writing a parser, not to validate some react scroll component as browser apis and the triggers mimicking costed days of work.
In fact we often had gigantic all green test suites for broken products.
That's to me over engineering an aspect of the engineering cycle.
by epolanski
"We're not trying to build a perfect solution here" is not something said to assuage over-engineering or encourage sloppy work.
It's said to head off a specific complaint from a specific kind engineer who will object that the proposed solution won't work because it doesn't cover some obscure edge case which rarely comes up in production.
"We're not trying to build a perfect solution here" is saying "We acknowledge not everything will be covered, we're setting the requirements at the 90th percentile use case".
by nickelpro
I wouldn't say that "over-engineering means solving the wrong problem". It's possible that the idea is basically correct, but people are directing effort towards optimizing for constraints that don't really exist or can be dealt with once a better picture is in place, whether it's the mythical PMF or just "we now understand what the users want, let's build that".
The worst clusterfuck I've ever worked on was a web application that was actually solving a real problem fairly well, but the team was spending time building an absurd Rube-Goldberg contraption of microservices when the entire platform had less MAU than my hobby website. It wasn't the wrong problem, but it certainly was over-engineered!
by qsort
I'm all for pushing back against "let's not make perfect the enemy of good." I hear that all the time in reference to software that is usually quite bad, and often a little evil to boot--nothing good anywhere in sight except some poor schmuck trying to find a way to make their job something worth taking pride in.
I'm not sure I agree that systems are products though. The product mindset is toxic. It means that you've got goals which are independent of the user's goals (typically to make money, which sometimes means doing something dastardly to the users on behalf of the shareholders).
All the best software is more in the "tool" category and less in the "product" category. Usually it's made by the users, only bothers with solving problems they have, and has no ulterior motives.
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- Hacker News
- I think over-complicated and over-engineered are not the same thing.
Over-complicated is adding too many features, too much mechanism, too many moving parts. Over-engineering is far exceeding the requirements in an unhelpful way. For example: build me a treehouse. Said treehouse could probably be made of wood. If you made it out of concrete and steel, it might be a heck of a lot stronger and last a heck of a lot longer, without being more complicated (just more expensive). Too strong is over-engineered. If you made a treehouse with 13 bedrooms and an elevator, glass windows, solar power, and running water, that's overcomplicated.
by titzer - The caveat here is, as TFA states, is that you need to have "every constraint on the table". And that is almost never the case. Unless you create something in a mature domain, where everything has already been explored, you _won't know_ what the constraints are.
You can spend three months in whiteboard sessions planning out the perfect solution, and then your plan falls apart the second you start implementing, because the real world imposes constraints on you that were practically impossible to know a priori. Not theoretically impossible, mind you. If you'd been smart enough and spent enough time thinking about it, you would have thought of them. But you aren't smart enough, and you don't have the time. Those are some other constraints that the universe puts on you.
by laszlojamf - "With one big caveat: you need a very clear set of requirements"
Most new product launches are an exercise in figuring out what the product requirements should be through trial and error (really: through ongoing dialogue with your users). Even mature products can have requirements change over time as the market changes.
I think internalizing this reality is why most senior engineers who work in domains that touch the messy real world will reflexively push back against perfectionism.
by mlinsey - I believe perfection is a dirty word because it has a pernicious effect on the human mind.
Striving towards perfection too often leads to yes over-engineering but I think more importantly it also: leads to way too much bike shedding due to the need to be perfect and allot of even emotional baggage when we don't make that perfect things.
Even the author admits that their definition of perfect can only arise with stringent requirements and I'll take it a step further, maybe it was perfect for that problem at that time but guess what change happens all the time, and as architects we have to think about future problems as much as current ones. With that in mind I think that having something that is good in many scenarios is better than the thing that is perfect in the scenario you start in.
- I don't share the definition of over engineering.
As engineering is the act of solving technical problems, over engineering is about putting too much engineering effort on aspects, features or products that don't have a linear payoff to the budget spent.
E.g. I worked in a company that was obsessed with unit test coverage metrics and the effort of maintaining the test suite was considerably biting in the ability to move the product. The ratio was 25% of product and 75% of unit tests.
And the payoff was small if not even negative, impacted morale, productivity and actively pushed back against refactors, because any large refactor was met with a disproportionate effort in unit test rewriting. Let alone the fact that as you were mocking external dependencies, and the mocks costed engineering effort and internals digging, it also suppressed work to keep it up to date.
I never got to convince the org to shift focus on E2E testing, which answered the real questions: does the product make money and works as expected. Uni test had to be used when writing a parser, not to validate some react scroll component as browser apis and the triggers mimicking costed days of work.
In fact we often had gigantic all green test suites for broken products.
That's to me over engineering an aspect of the engineering cycle.
by epolanski - "We're not trying to build a perfect solution here" is not something said to assuage over-engineering or encourage sloppy work.
It's said to head off a specific complaint from a specific kind engineer who will object that the proposed solution won't work because it doesn't cover some obscure edge case which rarely comes up in production.
"We're not trying to build a perfect solution here" is saying "We acknowledge not everything will be covered, we're setting the requirements at the 90th percentile use case".
by nickelpro - I wouldn't say that "over-engineering means solving the wrong problem". It's possible that the idea is basically correct, but people are directing effort towards optimizing for constraints that don't really exist or can be dealt with once a better picture is in place, whether it's the mythical PMF or just "we now understand what the users want, let's build that".
The worst clusterfuck I've ever worked on was a web application that was actually solving a real problem fairly well, but the team was spending time building an absurd Rube-Goldberg contraption of microservices when the entire platform had less MAU than my hobby website. It wasn't the wrong problem, but it certainly was over-engineered!
by qsort - I'm all for pushing back against "let's not make perfect the enemy of good." I hear that all the time in reference to software that is usually quite bad, and often a little evil to boot--nothing good anywhere in sight except some poor schmuck trying to find a way to make their job something worth taking pride in.
I'm not sure I agree that systems are products though. The product mindset is toxic. It means that you've got goals which are independent of the user's goals (typically to make money, which sometimes means doing something dastardly to the users on behalf of the shareholders).
All the best software is more in the "tool" category and less in the "product" category. Usually it's made by the users, only bothers with solving problems they have, and has no ulterior motives.