Ah. The ancient disease.

Overengineering isn’t about intelligence. It’s about psychology. And software engineers have a very specific psychological cocktail which makes them (and your fellow software engineer colleagues) who they are.

Let’s take a look at the reasons why some most software engineers have a nasty habit of overengineering:

1. Fear of the future

Software engineers are trained to think in edge cases.

Consider the following:

“What if we need this to scale?”
“What if we add plugins?”
“What if this becomes multi-tenant?”
“What if we swap databases?”

It’s therefore bred into us to not only solve today’s problems, but numerous imaginary ones which may (or may not) be a problem at some stage in the future.

Whereas it’s not stupidity to think outside the box as it were, but we should consider this as anxiety disguised as foresight.

2. Identity = Cleverness

Many engineers were the “smart one” growing up. I know I was. Were you?

Clean, simple code doesn’t feel impressive. Even if it does exactly what it needs to do.

What will your colleagues think of you writing such straightforward code?

Let’s add in some factories and dependency injection code to make it look so much more intelligent. Now that’s better!

But is it really needed?

Overengineering for many software engineers becomes a way to signal competence, like a gym junky flexing their muscles.

If it’s simple, it feels like cheating.

3. Trauma from bad codebases

If you’ve worked in a spaghetti horror show, you swing the other way.

You think:
“I will never allow this mess again.”

So you create architecture layers, abstractions, interfaces for everything. Some may be very good ideas, but many will likely lead to headaches for junior developers for many years to come.

The irony?

From working on a complex project previously, and assuming you can do it better, it’s very easy to recreate complexity — just in a different form.

4. Control

Abstractions feel like control.

• Interfaces
• Base classes
• Generic constraints
• Extension points

These create the illusion that the code is “prepared.” But ask yourself how much is actually necessary?

20%?

And how much will simply lead to more plumbing code which has no real practical use?

80%?

5. Reward systems in tech

Early in your career, complexity is praised.

• “Nice use of patterns.”
• “Great architecture.”
• “Very extensible.”

And that’s if you’re a good enough software engineer to be in tune with that stuff (I commend you if you do, because most developers don’t).

No one applauds: “Beautifully boring and minimal.”

We want praise for the work we do (and an elusive pay rise), so we have a nasty habit of optimising to what we get praise for.

6. Engineers optimise for elegance, not economics

Consider what the business wants – software which looks good and is sellable.

Does it work, and can we sell it yet?

Now consider what the software engineer wants:

A beautifully elegant masterpiece which is future-proof, cloud ready, scalable, and impressively complex.

These are not the same metric.

Now ask yourself what the client wants (because this is both the most important factor and the most overlooked one) – they don’t care how it’s written, how it’s architectured, or how it’s overengineered.

All they want is a tool to do their job. Simply and easily.

7. Overengineering feels safer than underengineering

Underengineering:

• Might break
• Might look amateur

Overengineering:

• Looks serious
• Looks considered
• Feels robust

So people bias toward complexity.

I’m old enough to remember when basic HTML and ASP.NET websites could be streamlined with AJAX – an early JavaScript technology which allowed parts of the web page to refresh seamlessly with a spinning wait cursor.

This meant the user didn’t need to watch the whole page refresh, which is something they probably didn’t care too much about at the time, but it also meant more complicated code.

And more overengineered JavaScript code which was harder and more time consuming to write, and as time went on also became much harder to maintain and debug.

When you consider the user simply wanted a form to bang in some data, you could argue this smart and flashy technology simply allowed software engineers to overengineer to their heart’s content.

This was over two decades ago, but the same still applies today.

Always consider your user – and create the simplest possible tool for them.

The deeper darker truth

So there you were flexing your mental muscles and creating the coolest code you could be proud about.

But the reality is most of it was overengineered complexity.

The reality is overengineering stemmed from the following:

• Fear of looking naive
• Fear of future criticism
• Desire to look competent
• Discomfort with uncertainty

And sometimes… boredom.

The mature engineer mindset

The most dangerous engineers aren’t the ones who know the most patterns.

They’re the ones who can resist using them.

The real flex is restraint.

Solve the problem in front of you.
Make it easy to change.
Not impressive — just obvious.

Simple code is psychologically uncomfortable.

But it’s usually correct.

Am I right? (Or wrong?)

---

Since you’re clearly a software engineer yourself — you’ve probably felt this tension too?

Should you implement that clever frameworky code now, or wait?

That’s the overengineering impulse knocking.

And the trick isn’t to kill it.

It’s to ask:

“Is this solving a real problem today, or protecting my ego from a hypothetical tomorrow?”