Comment by Ferret7446
1 month ago
You can definitely go overboard for work. If you want to do it as a hobby, go nuts, but there isn't a point in overengineering far beyond what is needed (recall the Juicero)
1 month ago
You can definitely go overboard for work. If you want to do it as a hobby, go nuts, but there isn't a point in overengineering far beyond what is needed (recall the Juicero)
Overengineering is building a bridge that will stand 1000 years when 100 will do; it's excess rigor for marginal benefit. Juicero wasn't overengineering, it was building a crappy bridge to nowhere with a bunch of gaudy bells and whistles to try and hide its uselessness and poor design, that collapsed with the first people to walk over it
Have you looked at a Juicero teardown [0]? It's overengineered to the point where it's a genuinely astonishing bit of engineering art. It's also an incredibly stupid product. Those things are completely compatible.
[0] https://blog.bolt.io/juicero/
Idk, it looks like most of what this person is complaining is that they don't see a lot of this in high volume consumer products. But like, most high volume comsumer products don't have to crank nearly the same amount of torque either.
It's a silly product, but as far as being over engineered, it looks like it's about what I'd expect for those requirements.
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AvE’s Juicero teardown is also a classic:
https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ?si=V-LLVn1cQmrMsiDZ
The pendulum has swung so far in the direction opposite of going overboard it’s almost laughable. Everyone retells the same twenty year old horror stories of architecture astronauts, but over a nearly thirty-year career I have seen precisely zero projects that failed due to engineers over-engineering, over-architecting, and over-refactoring.
I have however seen dozens of projects where productivity grinds to a halt due to the ever-increasing effort of even minor changes due to a culture of repeatedly shipping the first thing that vaguely seems to work.
The entire zeitgeist of software development these days is “move fast and break things”.