Managers should encourage their engineers to spend time trying to simplify architecture and reduce …

> I have also found that stressing simplicity as a key performance metric for engineers is a useful tool. Some of the smartest engineers I've ever worked with produce code that is so well crafted it feels simple when you look at it, but it's actually extremely clever. I think the conversation about "clever", "smart", "volatile" programmers tends to align the axis of _code_ complexity with cleverness, but often the cleverness is in finding the perfect simple solution.

"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better." -- Edsger W. Djikstra Complexity sells better because it's cheaper. This is not the, "look at this novel abstraction I wrote and proof of its correctness with respect to our specifications," kind of "complexity" that folks often mean. It's the hand-waving, just add the simplest patch you can to make it work for the business problem at hand , type of complexity. The kind of complexity that ends up with giant balls of "really simple" code that nobody understands entirely anymore. It sells better for all the usual reasons that driving slightly over the speed limit gets you where you're going a little faster. It's only a problem if you get caught or cause a collision.