Sadly, it ends up going pretty deep, too. 6 or 8 years ago, I was a second level manager looking to find the next managers in my group. There was an engineer w

Sadly, it ends up going pretty deep, too. 6 or 8 years ago, I was a second level manager looking to find the next managers in my group. There was an engineer who was great at mentoring and was exceptionally practical. What do I mean practical? I repeatedly saw her going to her PM and saying things like, "If we can skip this one feature, we can get the other dozen done in a week instead of a month and there will be less than half the code to maintain." The PM was more than happy to do this because he had a lot more features in the pipeline that he wanted to get to, and giving up that one meant getting a bunch more. That engineer initially turned down becoming a manager (a couple of years later, she became a great manager!). Her reason was that she felt she was the least capable engineer on the team, and she wouldn't know how to coach the better engineers. This confused me, so I asked why she felt she was the worst. She literally said, "[name redacted] can stay late and write a 1,000 lines of code in an evening. I haven't written a thousand lines of code in the last quarter." I had to explain that it's entirely possible that that person is a better programmer, but not a better engineer - they are not the same thing. And, that prolific programmer hadn't shipped a feature in months. Features, at least good ones, are an asset. Lines of code are a liability. You need the features to be valuable enough to pay for the ongoing cost of the lines of code. This engineer understood this intuitively, without realizing it consciously. The prolific programmer did not get it at all. So, even as I was trying to build a culture of better engineering (i.e., finding better trade-offs, including limiting complexity), these broad ideas about complexity==good were in the way, deep inside people's heads. Being able to foresee and head-off complexity is an incredibly valuable skill. Sometimes the complexity is worth it, but so often it's not.