Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

639 points

9 years ago

I have recently been involved in the overhaul of an established business with poor output into a functioning early/mid stage startup (long story). We are back on track but, honestly, my lessons learned fly in the face of a lot of currently accepted wisdom:

1) Choose languages that developers are familiar with, not the best tool for the job

2) Avoid microservices where possible, the operational cost considering devops is just immense

3) Advanced reliability / redundancy even in critical systems ironically seems to causes more downtime than it prevents due to the introduction of complexity to dev & devops.

4) Continuous integration seems to be a plaster on the problem of complex devops introduced by microservices.

5) Agile "methodology" when used as anything but a tool to solve specific, discrete, communications issues is really problematic

I think overall we seem to be over-complicating software development. We look to architecture and process for flexibility when in reality its acting as a crutch for lack of communication and proper analysis of how we should be architecting the actual software.

Is it just me?

368 comments

368 comments