In other words, programmers tend to over-engineer, and non-programmers tend to under-engineer. Despite all the arguments here about who’s making the biggest mes

In other words, programmers tend to over-engineer, and non-programmers tend to under-engineer. Despite all the arguments here about who’s making the biggest messes, that part is not surprising at all. Both are real problems. Over-abstraction and over-engineering can be very expensive up front and along the way, and we do a lot of it, right? Under-engineering is cheaper up front but can cause emergencies or cost a lot later. Just-right engineering is really hard to do and rarely ever happens because we never know in advance exactly what our requirements and data really are. The big question I have about scientific environments is why there isn’t more pair-programming between a scientist and a programmer? Wouldn’t having both types of expertise vetting every line of code be better than having each person over/under separately? Ultimately software is written by teams, and it’s not fair to point fingers at individuals for doing the wrong amount of engineering, it’s up to the entire team to have a process that catches the wrong abstraction level before it goes too far.