Comment by austin-cheney
10 hours ago
The name of the game is framing. You don't talk about simplicity, because most people don't really understand what simplicity is. They falsely equate it to easy.
Instead you talk about how you complete all your tasks and have so much bandwidth remaining compared to all your peers, the beneficial results of simplicity. Being severely under used while demonstrating the ability to do 2x-10x more work than everybody else is what gets you promoted.
In this vein simplicity is like hard work. Nobody gives a shit about hard work either. Actually, if all you have to show is how hard you work you are a liability. Instead its all about how little you work provided and that you accomplish the same, or more, than everybody else.
Exactly, simplicity is a subjective term; some think of it as in Clean Code where codebases end up as oneliner functions or overly formal lasagna code with many clean-feeling layers, but they can't see the resulting complexity in the overarching architeture.
Except you spend extra time making your code simple, rather than slapping together something that requires extra maintenance from the eventual owners.
Ideally we need metrics saying, "my projects require 30% less support or 50% less brainpower than comparable projects". Things like "average cyclomatic complexity", etc.
Simplicity is like any form of automation in that there is always an expensive upfront cost. The automation pays for itself by reducing time per interval, so its only a matter of when break even occurs as derived by the savings per interval multiplied by intervals in a given frequency.