“Complexity should come from the problem — not from the solution.” — Every sensible architect, ignored by everyone
Why Do We Love Complicated Code?
Picture this: You’re in a code review. Someone submits a function that counts user clicks. Simple, right? Wrong. What you get is a 400-line monstrosity with AbstractClickCountingStrategyFactory, ClickEventAggregator, and ClickMetricsRepository — all to increment a counter.
This isn’t coding. This is intellectual theater.
The Cult of “Clever Code”
In IT, there’s an unwritten rule: if your code doesn’t look like it was written by a PhD candidate on acid, you’re doing it wrong. Simple code? Suspicious. What if we missed an edge case? What if we need to scale to Mars? What if aliens invade and need to understand our click-counting algorithm?
And so begins the dance with abstraction — a dance that usually ends with everyone bleeding from the eyes.
The truth is: You’re not being clever. You’re being scared. Scared that simple code will reveal your lack of understanding. Scared that someone will think you’re not “enterprise-ready.” Scared that you’ll miss some edge case that doesn’t exist yet.
But here’s what actually happens: Your complex code becomes a liability. It’s harder to debug, harder to test, harder to maintain, and harder to explain to new team members. You’ve traded immediate comfort for long-term pain.
Real example: I once saw a UserAuthenticationService that had 12 layers of abstraction, 8 design patterns, and 3 different authentication strategies… for a login form that just needed to check if username/password matched the database. The developer’s comment? “This makes it enterprise-ready.”
Enterprise-ready for what? The apocalypse? No. It was enterprise-ready for failure. That system took 3 months to build, 2 weeks to debug, and was replaced by a 50-line solution within 6 months.
The Psychology of Overcomplication
Complexity Bias: People love complicated things because they look intelligent. Show someone a simple if/else statement and they’ll yawn. Show them a FactoryProxyAdapterWithCQRSHandler and they’ll think you’re a genius. Even if it does exactly the same thing.
This is backwards. Real intelligence is making complex problems simple, not simple problems complex.
Impostor Syndrome: Developers fear that simple code will reveal their incompetence. “If I don’t have 15 layers of abstraction, maybe I’m an amateur?”
No. You’re an amateur because you’re writing 15 layers of abstraction for a problem that needs 3 lines of code. Real professionals solve problems efficiently.
Enterprise Blindness: “We need CQRS, DDD, and microservices because that’s how it’s done in enterprise.”
Translation: “I read a blog post once and now I’m an architect.” Your app has 3 endpoints and 50 users. You don’t need microservices. You need a reality check.
The companies that actually use these patterns successfully have thousands of developers and millions of users. You have neither. Stop pretending.
“The goal is not to create a beautiful architecture. The goal is to create a useful model of the domain.” — Eric Evans
Technical Absurdity Indicators
Here’s how you know you’ve gone off the deep end:
Functions > 60 lines — You’ve violated NASA Rule 4. If NASA won’t let you put this code on a Mars rover, maybe you shouldn’t put it in production either.
Cyclomatic Complexity > 21 — Red alert. Your function has more decision points than a choose-your-own-adventure book. Time to refactor or get fired.
Dynamic allocations in critical path — You’re asking for trouble. It’s like juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle. Sure, it’s impressive, but eventually someone loses a limb.
Real example: I inherited a function that was 847 lines long. It had 47 different exit points, 23 nested loops, and a comment that said “TODO: Refactor this someday.” That function was older than some of the developers on the team. It was like trying to debug a haunted house — every time you opened a door, something unexpected jumped out at you.
That function cost the company $50,000 in debugging time over 6 months. A simple rewrite would have taken 2 days and cost $2,000. But nobody wanted to touch it because it was “too complex to understand.”
This is the real cost of overcomplication: not just technical debt, but actual financial debt.
NASA JPL applies 10 strict coding rules (Power of 10): no recursion, no goto, constant loop limits. Result? <0.1 defects per 1000 lines of code. Mars software flies, Earth software crashes.
Meanwhile, your “enterprise” application crashes when someone clicks the wrong button.
“Use the simplest thing that could possibly work.” — Kent Beck
Conway’s Law in Action
According to Conway’s Law, a system reflects the communication structure of the team. Silos in the company? You get microservices. Frontend, backend, devops not talking? Expect gateways, RESTs, and 14 layers in between.
“Any organization that designs a system will produce a design that copies its communication structure.” — Melvin Conway
Tool and Pattern Pathologies
Developers love installing packages. Even for date formatting. Instead of new Date().toLocaleDateString() — five dependencies for an “enterprise-ready date formatter.”
Real example: I saw a package.json with 847 dependencies. For a todo app. One of the dependencies was called left-pad — a package that adds spaces to the left of a string. It was 11 lines of code. The developer installed it because “it’s more maintainable.” More maintainable than writing 11 lines of code? What kind of logic is that?
Another classic: A team spent 3 weeks implementing a caching layer with Redis, Memcached, and a custom cache invalidation strategy. The app had 12 users. The cache hit rate was 0.1%. They could have just stored everything in memory and been fine for the next 5 years.
Dependency Addiction: You know you have this when your node_modules folder is bigger than your actual codebase. When you need a package to format a date, another package to validate an email, and a third package to decide which package to use. It’s like hiring a consultant to hire a consultant to hire a consultant.
Pattern Overuse: Every problem looks like a nail when you have a hammer. And when you have 47 hammers (design patterns), everything looks like it needs 47 different solutions.
Feature Creep: “What if someday we need to scale to Mars?” What if someday you need to actually ship something that works?
“Patterns should be used to solve specific problems, not to make code look enterprise-ready.” — Martin Fowler
Premature Decisions — Paralysis by Planning
“What if someday…”
The most dangerous mentality. Instead of solving the problem, we write code for scenarios that aren’t even in the backlog.
- Last Responsible Moment: Make decisions when necessary — not a moment sooner. Delaying decisions is a strategy, not inaction.
“You aren’t gonna need it.” — YAGNI Principle
Million-Dollar Failures
Healthcare.gov: $2.1 billion. The system crashed on launch day because it was built with 55 different contractors, 47 different databases, and a “federated architecture” that nobody understood. After reducing requirements to the absolute minimum, they launched in 3 months. The lesson? Start simple, add complexity only when you have actual users.
Knight Capital: $440 million lost in 45 minutes. A bug in their trading algorithm caused it to buy and sell the same stocks repeatedly, creating a feedback loop that drained their entire capital. The code was so complex that nobody could figure out what was happening until it was too late. Simple code doesn’t do that.
Twitter: Microservices created API chaos. They had 200+ microservices, each with its own database, deployment pipeline, and failure modes. The result? 99.9% uptime became 99.0% uptime, and productivity dropped by 40%. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
Boeing 737 MAX: MCAS automation without proper testing. Engineers added a complex flight control system to compensate for design flaws, but didn’t test it thoroughly. The result? Two crashes, 346 deaths, and a global grounding. Simple systems fail in simple ways. Complex systems fail in ways you can’t predict.
Fintech X: A company replaced 42 microservices with a modular monolith. Result? 90% reduction in deployment time, 80% reduction in bugs, and 70% reduction in infrastructure costs. Sometimes the “archaic” solution is the right solution.
The Path to Simplicity (For the Brave)
KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simplicity is not weakness, it’s a strategy. The best code is the code that doesn’t exist.
DRY — Don’t Repeat Yourself. One source of truth. If you’re copying and pasting code, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re creating abstractions to avoid copying and pasting, you might also be doing it wrong. The key is knowing the difference.
YAGNI — You Aren’t Gonna Need It. Stop coding for “maybe someday.” The future is unpredictable. The present is not.
Make it work → make it right → make it fast — in that order. Not the other way around. Premature optimization is the root of all evil, and premature architecture is the root of all complexity.
Simple-First Process
What is the business problem? Not the technical problem. The business problem. If you can’t explain it to a 5-year-old, you don’t understand it.
What is the minimum set of features needed? Not the nice-to-haves. Not the “what if someday” features. The absolute minimum to solve the problem.
What is the simplest way to make it work? The solution that requires the least code, the least complexity, and the least cognitive overhead.
Are metrics (CC, CC/LOC) safe? If your cyclomatic complexity is through the roof, refactor. Don’t add more layers.
If not — refactor, don’t add layers. When in doubt, simplify. When confused, simplify. When scared, simplify.
Real example: A team was building a user management system. They started with a simple CRUD app. Then they added role-based access control. Then they added multi-tenancy. Then they added audit logging. Then they added real-time notifications. The result? A system so complex that nobody could use it. They went back to the simple CRUD app and added features one at a time, only when users actually requested them.
Final Thoughts
Simple code is not a sign of amateurism. It’s proof that the programmer understands the problem, knows the constraints, and fights business requirements, not their own ego.
“Complication is a choice. Simplicity is maturity.”