The Person On The Left
I found this meme last week1 and I keep thinking about it.
This meme illustrates how many engineers, designers, or also product managers see themselves:
no experience: embrace simple and easy solutions because you do not know any better. At this stage, you find engineers building frontend and backend with JavaScript/TypeScript and designers reusing React templates.
some experience: continually try to show off the few skills you acquired in a niche domain and nitpick useless details. Usual suspects: engineers using Zig or Rust to implement a backend for 10 users (that includes their mom and dog).
a lot of experience: you understand that simple solutions are what work best. Either design (simple and clear design are better) or programming (simple code is easier to maintain and operate). We find here engineers with 10+ years of experience who build backend and frontend with JavaScript/TypeScript (or maybe Go).
You should always aim for simple solutions, either in design or software implementation. Users want simple and clear designs (think Blackberry vs. iPhone). Too often, we add layers of complex and useless features that nobody uses and end up in bloated products (almost every Microsoft product). Focus on simple solutions used by a large user base.
Occasionally, simple solutions are complex and hard to execute. This was especially true in the past, when implementing a simple search box (Google) required thousands of machines to set up and designing new algorithms. And today, most of the complexity is abstracted away by cloud providers. You should avoid execution risks and only embark on a difficult journey if this is justified by the potential business outcomes.
I did not remember where I found it, happy to credit the author of the meme