Over the last decade, I’ve spent my time fixing performance issues, untangling conceptual models, cleaning up pipelines, and generally taking things apart so I can put them back together to go fast. Through all of it, one truism remains: systems that are simple to reason about are easier to maintain, debug, and scale.
I’ve been told this is obvious. Yet, every company I walk into has a mess of code—a tangled, aging rat’s nest where yesterday’s quick fix has hardened into today’s critical infrastructure. Grain by grain, small oversights compound into load-bearing pearls of complexity that nobody dares touch.
Often, the original developers are still around. They understand the improvements that could be made but lack the time, authority, or appetite to rewrite the system that’s keeping the lights on. And when I dig deeper, it’s rarely a personal failure—it’s a systemic one. The complexity is tolerated, even defended, because addressing it is seen as an unjustifiable cost.
So what can you do? The only real solution is prevention.
Guardrails Against Complexity:
- Treat any one-off complexity as a blinking red warning light.
- Before solving a problem with an overly complex solution, ask: Can we avoid solving this entirely?
Technical debt isn’t just about writing bad code—it’s about making bad bets. And the easiest way to win is to stop playing losing hands before they’re dealt.
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