A lot of developer cycles are spent discussing the benefits of YAGNI and KISS. On the surface it would seem that there is an army of righteous developers fighting against the demons of over-engineering and maximum complexity. And despite our valiant battles, despite all the books and blog posts and rallying calls from respected technology professionals, the demons are still churning out bloated, impossible to maintain code.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. We are the enemy. Not just the guy who sits next to you, or the guy that churned out mess of code and then left the company. You are the problem. I am the problem. The enemy is us.

Yes, we can all agree in principle that complexity is bad and simplicity is good. The problem is that complexity is completely subjective. Maybe you misjudge or were misinformed about how likely it is that a certain feature will be needed. Maybe you thought of some brilliant solution and you want to leave it as a placeholder in case you need to come back to it later (or so others can see how clever you are). Maybe you don’t want to do it the cheap way because you’re afraid others will snicker at your solution. Maybe you’re afraid a simple solution will lead to longer development times later on. Maybe your definition of simplicity is skewed. Whatever the case, no one sets out to over-complicate a piece of code. And yet it happens time and time again.

There are rules of thumb that can be followed. But what it boils down to is always discipline. It’s not easy to simplify. It sometimes feels wrong. But I’ve never looked at working code and cursed because it was too simple. I’m not even sure it’s possible for working code to be too simple. But it sure as hell easy for it to be too complex.

So why is over-engineering is like snoring? Because no one thinks they do it. And yet somehow there is a market for snoring relief aides.

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