March 4, 2026
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Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity
Simple gets ghosted; flashy builds win the raise
TLDR: An essay claims simple solutions get sidelined while flashy complexity wins promotions. Comments clash: some say sell simplicity in business results, others yell 'leave the complexity cult,' and a mysteriously 'dead' earlier post fuels drama about incentives, metrics, and what teams choose to celebrate.
A fiery essay on Terrible Software argues the office hero isn’t the person who ships the simple thing that works, but the one who unveils a shiny, complicated empire of boxes and buzzwords. The community didn’t hold back. One camp cheered, calling it complexity theater and joking about “box-drawing Olympics” in interviews where adding more squares somehow equals genius. Another camp pushed back: simplicity doesn’t need pity, it needs results. As codingdave snapped, you get promoted when you say “reduced incidents by 80%,” not “my code was cute.”
LAC-Tech chimed in from the trenches, trying to sell simplicity to “semi-tech literate” customers and refusing to chase whatever Forbes thinks is cool. Then ekjhgkejhgk dropped the meta-take: companies measure what’s easy, not what matters, so subtle wins—like clean code—get ignored. Old-school fans brought receipts, name-dropping Dijkstra and linking the classic rant on keeping it small. The hottest take? lccerina saying if your workplace worships unnecessary layers, leave.
There was even forum-side drama: moi2388 spotted a “dead” earlier post and asked what happened, sparking conspiracy jokes about mods fearing the simplicity agenda. Whether you call it résumé-driven development or emoji-powered promotions, the mood is clear: simple is smart—but only if you can prove it’s saving money, outages, and headaches.
Key Points
- •The essay argues that organizational evaluation systems tend to reward complex solutions over simple ones.
- •A comparison between two engineers shows how over-engineered work generates stronger promotion narratives than simple, effective implementations.
- •System design interviews often steer candidates toward adding complexity (services, queues, sharding) to demonstrate scalability knowledge.
- •Design reviews can push “future-proofing,” leading to unnecessary abstractions and layers that may not address current needs.
- •The author concludes that simplicity’s benefits are often invisible in current processes, reinforcing a bias toward over-engineering.