The pendulum has swung so far in the direction opposite of going overboard it’s almost laughable. Everyone retells the same twenty year old horror stories of architecture astronauts, but over a nearly thirty-year career I have seen precisely zero projects that failed due to engineers over-engineering, over-architecting, and over-refactoring.

I have however seen dozens of projects where productivity grinds to a halt due to the ever-increasing effort of even minor changes due to a culture of repeatedly shipping the first thing that vaguely seems to work.

The entire zeitgeist of software development these days is “move fast and break things”.