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flowerlad • today at 6:02 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

From the blog he linked to: "I’m going to try designing something way more ambitious."

This is how you end up with unnecessary complexity [1]. The best engineers don't aim for "designing something ambitious", instead they come up with the simplest possible design. They take something that seems complex and make it simple.

Unfortunately that's not how engineers are evaluated [2].

[1] https://goomics.net/316

[2] https://terriblesoftware.org/2026/03/03/nobody-gets-promoted...


Replies

themgt • today at 6:12 PM

The best engineers don't aim for "designing something ambitious", instead they come up with the simplest possible design

These are orthogonal.

A lot of the dissonance on HN appears to come from two groups of people talking past each other:

a) developers working at some corporation they hate vs.

b) developers working for themselves or somewhere they don't hate

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