+1, plus I'll add that I think there's organizational factors too. Overall, organizations incentivize complexity, and I'd like to point out three ways in which

+1, plus I'll add that I think there's organizational factors too. Overall, organizations incentivize complexity, and I'd like to point out three ways in which they do: - One is that new systems tend to be rewarded, because people and organizations tend to associate "new" with "better". Related, people and organizations tend to associate high complexity systems with "hard work", and the transactional view of work tends to err on the side of rewarding "hard work". - Next is that complexity digs a moat of job security. I don't think this is a bad thing, job security is good. Again, unfortunately the transactional view of work can easily devolve into "we can pay someone less to do what you do" and building a complex system is a way to counter that. - Lastly, a story. At some point I worked on a team that quadrupled in size to tackle huge project, only to then fall into a sort of "identity crisis" because the project was done and there wasn't enough meaningful work afterwards for everyone. This insane growth, in my opinion, was also fueled by egos. The overarching team manager seemed pretty adamant in finding more people to hire, but I don't necessarily remember us feeling understaffed. They clearly expressed they wanted to use all the headcount the company had authorized, and the primary reason they always mentioned was that we'd "lose it if we didn't use it by the end of the year". This led to an "induced demand"-like situation. By the end of it, we had a huge team, the bigger meta-project was done, and everyone needed to find the next thing to work on and build. I saw plenty of proposals for solutions looking for a problem, and worked on some myself too before leaving.