Why Over-Engineering Happens

If you’ve worked in software long enough, you’ve probably seen it: a CRUD app serving a handful of users, deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with half the CNCF landscape stitched together for good measure. On paper it looks impressive. In reality, it’s a Rube Goldberg machine solving problems the team doesn’t actually have.

Contrast that with Levels.fyi. The site now helps millions of engineers compare salaries and career ladders, but when it started, the “backend” was just Google Forms feeding into a Google Sheet. No microservices, no Kubernetes, no event bus. Just the simplest tools they could get their hands on. That lightweight setup gave them speed. They validated the idea, grew an audience, and only invested in more complex systems once the product had proven itself. In other words: simplicity didn’t hold them back; it made their success possible. You also need to remember how some of the most complex infrastructures started out very simple. Airbnb, facebook, reddit to name a few. They were scrappy monoliths before they became household names.

That’s the main character syndrome we all keep catching. Somewhere along the way, architecture became