I was going to joke that it’s easy to tell who’s over 30 in this thread, but surprisingly the complexity farmers don’t seem to be correlated with age. It seems to be a learned habit that they just never drop. Indeed, they feel it’s a matter of professionalism not to drop it.
I agree with you that there’s not a lot of hope when working with such people. The best you can do is not to engage most of the time, then do some strategic social jujitsu when they’re proposing their astronaut designs in meetings.
It's not age. I have a uni mate the exact same age as me and we worked together and still talk about work.
He's the kind that would do his own oop framework in plain C (true story) while I would rather do the minimum necessary for things to work (well, if that includes UNAVOIDABLE complexity, so be it). It was like that when we were 25, it's the same 20 years later.
Well now I'm confused about which type I am. I consider myself a "simplifier", but writing your own OOP framework sounds fun I would have definitely chosen that route.
I think both types can enjoy fun diversions. I think being a "simplifier" just means you can make a distinction between diversions and solutions.
For me, every additional moving part has a cost, and that cost needs to be amortized over sufficient use-cases. Sometimes writing your own OOP framework in C is just what the doctor ordered. Sometimes it isn't.
> The best you can do is not to engage most of the time, then do some strategic social jujitsu when they’re proposing their astronaut designs in meetings.
In that case, fire them. Seriously..
If you can't engage with someone, it does nobody any favors. Getting the team up to speed to agree on an approach can often take 10x longer than implementation. (Settimg up meetings, perhaps two days in a row three days from now, etc..) Set that pattern where it takes weeks to do design reviews, and the other person will be frustrated they spend all their time blocked trying to get the teams buy-in. So, they may go ahead and do stuff so that they can be unblocked.
Worse, if the rest of the team are just 9 to 5'ers, they have no incentive to dedicate so much time in a design review. They might not care.
How does a person consider the teams impact of a complex solution when it might not be obvious - by engaging. Perhaps the problem domain is actually very complex, the rest of the team is suffering from the "shit is simple" syndrome. Or maybe the inverse is happening. Either way, social jujitsu strikes me as very passive aggressive and not at all enabling for the _whole_ team. Sounds like it can easily devolve to a case of " we have a team of 10x'ers, but our process and team cohesion reduce efficiency by 95%"
I agree with you that there’s not a lot of hope when working with such people. The best you can do is not to engage most of the time, then do some strategic social jujitsu when they’re proposing their astronaut designs in meetings.