You can't measure the impact of not creating a steaming pile of complexity.

Those verbs (reduced, decreased, increased) all assume the situation was "bad" already. Avoiding that in the initial design is what's poorly rewarded.

Building a system that's fast on day one will not usually be rewarded as well as building a slow system and making it 80% faster.

I've found simplicity rarely earns promotions because it's invisible on a P&L and executives respond to hard numbers. In one role I converted a refactor into a business case with a 12-month cost model, instrumented KPIs in Prometheus and Grafana, and ran a canary that cut MTTR by 60% and reduced on-call pages by two-thirds. Companies reward new features over quiet reliability, so slow feature velocity for a quarter while you amortize the simplification. If you want the promotion, make a one-page spreadsheet tying the change to SLO improvements, on-call hours saved, and dollar savings, then own the instrumentation so the numbers are undeniable.

Absolutely. And if you asked them if they're rather have it sooner, or keep it simpler, they'd pick "sooner" every time.

This used to be true. Companies love efficiency. How does this stack up with modern AI? Seems those metrics would go in the opposite directions.

Thanks for the sane take. This article is engagement-porn for every engineer who ever looked at a system they didn't understand and declared they could do it much simpler. It's not because people love to promote complexity-makers, soothing as that thought might be.

Never seen these metrics in real life, especially in engineering.

"Code footprint is 80% more efficient / less"

(when there is a simpler design over more complex "big ball of mud abomination" in contrast)

You are citing negative metrics. The reality is that companies only care about positive metrics: increase marginal revenue by 30%

That's regardless of the lip service they pay to cost cutting or risk reduction. It will only get worse, in the AI economy it's all about growth.

Except when one of the criteria for promos is "demonstrates complexity". Then you results do matter, but you don't have the "complexity" box checked.

And mostly these numbers are made up BS. But management will eat them up.

> "Reduced incidents by 80%", "Decreased costs by 40%", "Increased performance by 33% while decreasing server footprint by 25%"

My experience is no one really gets promoted/rewarded for these types of things or at least not beyond an initial one-off pat on the back. All anyone cares about is feature release velocity.

If it's even possible to reduce incidents by 80% then either your org had a very high tolerance for basically daily issues which you've now reduced to weekly, or they were already infrequent enough that 80% less takes you from 4/year to 1/year.. which is imperceptible to management and users.