I’ve gotten promoted for simplicity several times. “Why are we jumping through hoops to make an Xbase file on a network share be accessible to multiple users updating data at the same time? Uh, can I introduce you to PostgreSQL?”

“Hear me out: what if instead of deploying a fleet of web servers to handle 10M identical GET requests per second, we put a handful of servers behind a few Varnish caches with a 1 second expiration?”

“Wait, this thing is spec’d to serve 3000 requests per day and an acceptable downtime of 20 hours per week? Kubernetes is cool, but why don’t we spin up a single VPS and run the whole stack on it?”

There’s a subtle art to talking dev teams down off a ledge, but sometimes the simple path is better in every way. Being able to spot those times is golden. And, of course, knowing when the simplest reasonable version is still quite complex and being willing to roll with it is equally important.