Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity

"Simplicity is a great virtue, but it requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate. And to make matters worse, complexity sells better. Nobody sits down and says, 'let's make sure the people who over-engineer things get promoted!' But that's what can happen when companies evaluate work incorrectly."

"Engineer B's work practically writes itself into a promotion packet: 'Designed and implemented a scalable event-driven architecture, introduced a reusable abstraction layer adopted by multiple teams, and built a configuration framework enabling future extensibility.' That practically screams Staff+. But for Engineer A's work, there's almost nothing to say. Her work was better. But it's invisible."

Engineering teams often inadvertently promote overengineering while overlooking simplicity. Two engineers tackling similar features demonstrate this pattern: one delivers a straightforward 50-line solution quickly and efficiently, while another spends three weeks building elaborate abstractions, pub/sub systems, and configuration frameworks. During promotion evaluations, the complex solution generates compelling narratives about scalable architectures and extensibility, while the simple solution appears unremarkable despite being superior. This misalignment occurs not through intentional bias but through flawed evaluation criteria that conflate complexity with competence. The result systematically disadvantages engineers who prioritize pragmatism and maintainability, creating perverse incentives that reward unnecessary technical debt and overbuilding.

Read at Terrible Software