I am one of those people - an academic type that likes to over-engineer, and at least partially …

There are a couple of engineers on my current team that I can only describe as being a little too smart for their own good, and I'm struggling a bit with how to work with them. I've worked with this sort of engineer on previous teams as well, and they all share a few traits: - They're brilliant, I mean very smart people (in an almost academic way?) - They have a big appetite for adding complexity to systems - They also have a big appetite for adding work to their own plates - Their code has no consistent style I work in embedded systems, so I'm generally writing C for resource-constrained systems. This sort of environment is rife with footguns, and I spend most of my time just trying to avoid those. A big part of that is keeping the things that my team controls as simple as possible, and while we are resource constrained, it's a balance. The tension comes when someone's more than happy t…