In tech, there’s constant pressure to use the newest, most sophisticated solutions. But after years of building systems, we’ve learned a counterintuitive truth: simple beats smart, almost every time.
The Complexity Trap
It’s tempting to reach for complex solutions. They’re intellectually satisfying. They look impressive in architecture diagrams. They give engineers interesting problems to solve.
But complexity has costs:
- More things that can break
- Harder to debug when things go wrong
- Steeper learning curve for new team members
- Higher maintenance burden over time
Real Examples
The Over-Engineered Recommendation System
A client wanted product recommendations. The “smart” approach: build a sophisticated machine learning pipeline with real-time feature engineering, A/B testing infrastructure, and multiple model ensembles.
What we built instead: A simple rule-based system that recommended products frequently bought together. It took a week instead of three months, and it performed nearly as well.
When the simple version proved valuable, we had the option to make it smarter. But we started simple.
The Unnecessary Microservices
Another client had a monolithic application they wanted to “modernize” with microservices. The problem? They had a team of three developers and modest traffic.
Microservices would have added:
- Network complexity
- Deployment complexity
- Debugging complexity
- Infrastructure costs
We helped them improve their monolith instead. Faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain.
When to Choose Complexity
Simple doesn’t mean simplistic. Sometimes complexity is genuinely necessary:
- When you have proven scale requirements
- When different components need different scaling characteristics
- When you have the team to maintain it
- When simpler approaches have been tried and failed
The key word is “proven.” Don’t build for hypothetical scale or hypothetical requirements.
Our Decision Framework
When evaluating solutions, we ask:
- What’s the simplest thing that could work?
- What are the actual (not imagined) requirements?
- Who will maintain this in 2 years?
- Can we start simple and add complexity later?
The Bottom Line
Boring technology is underrated. It’s well-understood, well-documented, and battle-tested. Save the cutting-edge stuff for when you genuinely need it.
Simplicity first. That’s not just a motto—it’s our engineering philosophy.