And I can't stand developers who overengineer things. We have a couple of them at my company and something that should take a few hours always take several weeks just because of all the reasons you mention. Most things don't need that kind of features and maintainability and if they do in the future we can just rewrite them from scratch. The overall expected return on investment is still better since we seldom need to.
Because in all too many companies, re-writing from scratch is a no-go, no matter how quickly and sloppily an initial solution was thrown together. I've worked on a prototype => production type project, where the throwaway was never thrown away. (the initial team made some mistakes, chief among them was building one prototype of a whole system, rather than one per major risk)
This is a systemic problem. Engineering is always subordinate to business. This simply should not be the case. We desperately need new business organization models.
Quite the opposite, and, quite simple: engineers over-engineer thing in order to make things generic. and generic make solutions robust. that's basic science. Unless the problem and solution are well understood, your investment won't guarantee a return at all.
Generic, by default, does not in any way make things more robust.
We've gone from engineering solutions to meet specific problems to engineering solution frameworks that (supposedly) will solve the problem and allow for any unknowns. The problem is, no matter how hard the engineer tries, he can never anticipate the unknowns to the extent that the application framework can support all of them.
We should go back to solving the specific problem at hand. In both scenarios you get the customer who wants a feature that absolutely doesn't fit with the current application, therefore a rewrite is necessary. And with the specific solution, you don't have nearly the man hours wasted.
No, developers over-engineer because setting up a 20-node Hadoop cluster is fun, whereas doing the same task in an hour in Excel means you have to move onto some other boring task.
Generic doesn't mean robust either, I don't know where you got that from,the two concepts are entirely unrelated.
Generic -> robust. i... i dont know how to explain that. honestly i haven't thought about the necessity of explaining things like this. its... basic mathematics.
I'm sorry, but if you cannot explain it, you simply do not understand it yourself.
That's harsh, I get it, and I'm truly sorry, but that's a basic fact.
No. Look to safety-critical software for intuition on why.
Simpler is more reliable. Also, it's hard to know enough about a problem to make a generic solution until you've solved the problem 2-3 times already. But ... having solved a problem multiple times increases the risk that you will be biased towards seeing new problems as some instance of the old problem and therefore applying unsuitable "generic" solutions.
