Companies, please, hire people that like simple solutions.

I couldn’t agree more. I’m after starting in a new company and the state of their code can only be described as a huge cluster fuck, many levels of abstraction, plus cross dependencies and a massive pile of singletons to maintain a references across the board. God please give me strength.

That should be the managers job.

Tame the anarchy, make sure no one tries to "show off everything they _could_ do"

Lol. We have shit tools that require complicated solutions that management won't update... So... Anyway...

All "solutions" are "simple" to anyone who hasn't a clue to how things work. Just because the "solution provider" can't see it as "simple" is not the customers' problem.

Heh, I thought you were talking about customers. My bad. It sorta fits.

To me, as someonw who does data engineering for a marketing consultantcy, "simple solutions" are solutions that our clients see as making their business better and can use themselves when we walk away. A solution can be the simplest thing ever thought of but can seem alien to anyone who has never seen it before. If I spent my time building a solution that a client couldn't use in the end, I'd think of that as a failure and a waste of my time.

Apart from business people and devs liking complexity, another problem lies in the real world processes/problems that have to be modeled by the solutions.
Compliance and business needs are full of corner and edge cases. Because of that, simplifying business processes is hard and with complex business processes you almost always end up requiring complex software solutions.

So it all has to start with a management mindset of continous refactoring and simplification of both: The business processes and the software helping to implement them.
That is a pretty rare mindset in managers and devs today. So i doubt, there is any hope...

@Oktokolo understanding is an important part of a solution. What I see a lot of the time is people in clients being reluctant to change because they don't understand how the proposed solution will be more simple and advantageous to their business. We need to make them understand before they see the simplicity.

@cmarshall10450
Yep, obviously, they will not do it, if they don't understand what to do.
And most still won't do when not understanding, why.

"But my new hire does like simple solutions, what could be simpler than a single file containing all the code?"

Simple solutions work iun short time only

If you build for years, you need abstraction, you need DI, you need extra layers.

I will NEVER hire a monkey who comes over and just says "Wow, that can be 1 line of code". Writes this line. This line has magic strings everywhere, no settings no reusability.

The statement itself is ridiculous...

Reason can be seen in this thread.

Simple is undefined - what simple means cannot be inferred from the context the author wrote.

Adjectives without lengthy explanations are mostly prone to be misunderstood.

(Speaking from experience here xD)

@NoToJavaScript

As an (counter-) example to your statement, a simple one line lambda can be more effective and _simple_ than a full blown iterative or recursive loop.

A generator function with e.g. yield is a _simple_ solution which can also be used to assure type safety - e.g. by defining the specific types in the function header, leading to simplicity and resilience.

Generator to extract from a loop preparing a result set.

:)

Eg. object composition and multi inheritance can lead to _simple_ reusability of code, but maintenance will be hard and refactoring klingon pain sticks up your butt.

Yay for the bullshit bingo word simple.

@IntrusionCM Yes this is true.
Until the moment you decide to add some additional rules to this one liner.
Ofc, if every single definition is known, go ! Write it ! (I do it my self), but in reality, even a simple ‘Select sum()” will not stay as simple and if the whole system is built on these one liners, you are going to have a bad time when you suddenly need to add filters or conditions o access management.

I’m ready to get downvoted but I’d rather they develop solutions so they don’t need to hire people.
Or the least amount of people.