Overengineering is part ego, sure, part new technologies and boredom, sure. The biggest factor I've found in overengineering is the lack of a long term roadmap

Overengineering is part ego, sure, part new technologies and boredom, sure. The biggest factor I've found in overengineering is the lack of a long term roadmap. If you need to build a feature X, and you engineer the bare minimum and need to put in the same amount of hours to do X+1, your management is going to be upset that you're taking too long to ship. You already had it 80% (in terms of feature complete) of the way there, why is that extra 20% as hard as the first 80%? So the engineers build up scar tissue. If you have to handle a ton of cases that you don't understand, why not build a CaseHandlerFactory so you can add the next feature faster? A clear roadmap of "this is what we want in 1 year" will help solve over engineering. Otherwise engineers are incentivized to make their code as configurable, modifiable, and extendable, as possible, regardless of cost or business need. Not to mention all the additional time trying to figure out "canonical" data models that will "future-proof" the applications interfaces. If you have to iterate quickly (which is not as common as agile folks wish), you need to build up a raport with leadership to help them understand that speed comes with trade offs: faster might mean 'more work to change later', while slower to market today might mean faster iteration down the line. These discussions ARE valuable for leadership, as sometimes they need a quick win because of a Q3 earnings hole or contract, and sometimes they are willing to make longer term investments. You move too quickly, they call your solutions hacky, you move too slowly, they call it overengineered. Everyone needs to be on the same page of what the change is trying to do: win short term, win long term, or somewhere in the middle.