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Incredible opening quote from Dijkstra:

Simplicity is a great virtue, but it requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate. And to make matters worse, complexity sells better. --Edsger Dijkstra

It's easier to make a compelling narrative about a complexly architected, "robust" system that is super scalable. It's harder to have much to say about unrealized complexity avoided by a simpler solution.

Her work was better. But it’s invisible because of how simple she made it look. You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.

Complexity is unavoidable at times. A frequent dichotomy I see is inherent versus accidental complexity. The author gets at a different distinction -- unearned complexity.

The issue isn’t complexity itself. It’s unearned complexity. There’s a difference between “we’re hitting database limits and need to shard” and “we might hit database limits in three years, so let’s shard now.”

Part of the solution here is to be careful about rewarding complexity institutionally as well as publicly and socially:

One more thing: pay attention to what you celebrate publicly. If every shout-out in your team channel is for the big, complex project, that’s what people will optimize for. Start recognizing the engineer who deleted code. The one who said “we don’t need this yet” and was right.