The Problem of Over-engineering

This post about “The Sad State of Web Development” is pretty funny. I agree. I think the ultimate dream of all computer science majors is to create their own frameworks because it would earn the highest respect among their peers. Why? Because the problems they were taught to solve in school are the problems of computer science. They didn’t study the problems in, say, medicine, economics, or education. By solving the problems in education, for instance, they wouldn’t get peer respect because their peers are not educators. Everyone wants to be respected by their own peers. This type of specialization creates a conflict of interest. The interests of computer engineers often do not align with the interests of the business because they live in their own world with different values.

It’s about time the business world realizes that these latest greatest technologies don’t provide the ROI they are looking for. It’s not worth investing in these trendy technologies for the bragging rights. At this point, whatever frameworks and languages we have available are good enough for 99% of the problems we need to solve. The new ones are just solutions looking for problems. Since these problems don’t actually exist, these engineers are using them to build rather mundane things like blogs, todo lists, and photo galleries. They are indeed “over engineered.” It’s like using an iPhone as a hammer. As you could imagine, an iPhone would make a lousy hammer.