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It's also a bit of an abuse of the term. Overengineering in engineering (mechanical, civil and other similar disciplines) means building a component to withstan
by ironmagma 6y ago
It's also a bit of an abuse of the term. Overengineering in engineering (mechanical, civil and other similar disciplines) means building a component to withstand more than the absolute minimum. So, a bridge you'd want to be overengineered by a factor of 2 or 3 at least, whereas airplanes are hardly overengineered (lower factor of safety).
- miltondts 6y agoAh I was not aware of the general term and its' meaning. As you say, quite the abuse of the expected meaning.
- Ma8ee 6y agoBut isn’t that how the term is used? The system is over engineered when it is built to scale to a million concurrent users while we current only have a hundred. Or when it is built to handle use cases that no one has required.
- ironmagma 6y agoIn this context I read it more as being excessively complicated to some unspecified end rather than engineered to withstand a load way larger than necessary.
- Ma8ee 6y agoOften it is excessively complicated because it’s divided into dozens of services to be able to scale, or having extra abstraction layers to deal with imagined future requirements.
- ironmagma 6y agoSure, but the fact that those requirements are imaginary instead of real is why it’s not actual overengineering. Overengineering is done with a specific dimension of scalability in mind for something that probably will happen, and there’s a budget for it too, etc.