In my 25-year career I’ve experienced easily fifty times as much pain from underthought and hastily-implemented systems than I have from overengineered ones.
Sure, build user-facing stuff cheaply and ready to be thrown away as requirements change. But libraries, tooling, and infrastructure that everything else is built on top of should have thought and care invested in it. This will return dividends.
We spend so much time as an industry worried that somebody might put five percent more effort into a project than it’s worth, that the overwhelming majority of engineers have no idea whatsoever of how to build something to be reliable, to be easily iterated on, and to last. And so we spend tens of times more effort trying to build on top of a mountain of crap.
Sure, build user-facing stuff cheaply and ready to be thrown away as requirements change. But libraries, tooling, and infrastructure that everything else is built on top of should have thought and care invested in it. This will return dividends.
We spend so much time as an industry worried that somebody might put five percent more effort into a project than it’s worth, that the overwhelming majority of engineers have no idea whatsoever of how to build something to be reliable, to be easily iterated on, and to last. And so we spend tens of times more effort trying to build on top of a mountain of crap.