> But usually it makes sense to "err on the side of overengineering". Because (limited) overengineering merely means some development effort was wasted, while u

> But usually it makes sense to "err on the side of overengineering". Because (limited) overengineering merely means some development effort was wasted, while underengineering can easily mean years of painful tech debt that is an order of magnitude or two more expensive than the wasted effort from overengineering. In our case there was a lot of overengineering by novices, so a lot of the tech debt involves unwinding overengineering to make a simple change. Some of the "credit card" debt was simply using too many 3rd party libraries. > (It's similar to building a house. You usually want to make doubly sure you really do everything right or more than right, because if there are any flaws that turn up later, this often gets very expensive to rectify, sometimes so expensive that it isn't even worth fixing at all.) My fish tank guy told me how he once went to install in a new home, and the general contractor put a structural beam every 3-4 inches under the fish tank. It make it impossible to put in the filters. (In contrast, I only have one structural beam in the middle of my 180 gallon, through-the-wall, tank.)