Fear of over-engineering has killed engineering altogether
In the last 20 years, we have seen how engineering has become out of fashion. Developers must ship, ship, and ship, but, sir, please don’t bother them; let them cook!
There are many arguments that go like “programming is too complex; it is not a science but an art form, so let’s YOLO it." And while there is a certain truth to that, I would like to make a counterargument.
If you’ve been in tech for long enough, you can see the pendulum always swinging from one end to another. The more you've seen, the more you realize that interesting things happen in the middle. In the land of nuance and “it depends."
Before the 2000s, academics ruled computer science. They tried to understand what "engineering" meant for programming. They borrowed practices from other fields. Like dividing architects from practitioners and managing waterfall projects with rigorous planning.
This gave way to the creation of the Agile Manifesto, which disrupted not only how we program, but also how we do business in tech altogether. Both Lean Startup and later the famous YC Combinator insisted on moving fast, iterating, and not worrying about planning.
