Waste of Complexity

Adding complexity is generally not a conscious decision.  If you’re very knowledgeable in a certain area, then you’re probably going to want to use that knoweldge whenever you can, even it’s not necessarily a good fit for what you’re trying to accomplish at the time.  If you have a huge toolset, you’re probably going to be eager to use those tools whenever you can, but, in reality, I don’t need a hammer, screwdriver, socket wrench, power drill and bevel gauge to hang a picture on the wall.  Well, okay, I might because I generally suck at home improvement, but you get my point.

I guess the main point that I’m trying to drive home is that if you approach a project with the mindset that you’re trying to solve a business problem, you’ll probably wind up developing a simpler, more maintainable and probably more performant piece of software.  The reality of the situation is that you’re trying to get from where the business is now (Point A) to where they want to be (Point B). If you take this approach, you’ll probably even find business areas that can be improved upon and, in the process, probably make your superiors very happy.  If you take the approach that you need to use the latest and greatest technology in every situation without really rationalizing those choices against the task at hand, you’ll probably wind up building an overly complex beast of a system that no one can maintain, or maybe even use, after you’re gone.  When you put all of your focus on using every single tool in your toolset (again, sorry for the metaphors), then the overall user experience generally suffers as well.

So, in the future, try to look at it from the businesses point of view.  More than likely, they’ve hired you becuase you’re smart and you’re good at what you do.  They already know that.  You can really impress them by showing that you’re able to see the forest for the trees, where the forest is the business and the trees are the software that drives it.  If you can do that, all that you’ll see are areas for improvement, not in your code, but in the functionality of the the application itself.