I see your point. But accidental complexity is the most uncomfortable work there is to me. Do programmers really find so much fun in creating accidental complexity?

Removing it, no matter whether I created it myself, sure, that can be a hard problem.

I've certainly been guilty creating accidental complexity as a form of procrastrination I guess. But building a microservices architecture is not one of these cases.

FWIW, the alternative stack presented here for small web sites/apps seems infinitely more fun. Immediate feedback, easy to create something visible and change things, etc.

Ironically, it could also lead to complexity when in reality, there is (for example) an actual need for a message queue.

But setting up such stuff without a need sounds easier to avoid to me than, for example, overgeneralizing some code to handle more cases than the relevant ones.

When I feel there are customer or company requirements that I can't fulfill properly, but I should, that's a hard problem for me. Or when I feel unable to clarify achievable goals and communicate productively.

But procrastrination via accidental complexity is mostly the opposite of fun to me.

It all comes back when trying to solve real problems and spending work time solving these problems is more fun than working on homemade problems.

Doing work that I am able to complete and achieving tangible results is more fun than getting tangled in a mess of unneeded complexity. I don't see how this is fun for engineers, maybe I'm not an engineer then.

Over-generalization, setting wrong priorities, that I can understand.

But setting up complex infra or a microservices architecture where it's unneeded, that doesn't seem fun to me at all :)

I 100% agree.

Normally the impetus to overcomplicate ends before devs become experienced enough to be able to even do such complex infra by themselves. It often manifests as complex code only.

Overengineered infra doesn't happen in a vacuum. There is always support from the entire company.

"Do programmers really find so much fun in creating accidental complexity?"

I certainly did for a number of years - I just had the luck that the cool things I happened to pick on in the early/mid 1990s turned out to be quite important (Web '92, Java '94).

Now my views have flipped almost completely the other way - technology as a means of delivering value.

Edit: Other cool technology that I loved like Common Lisp & CLOS, NeWS and PostScript turned out to be less useful...

> Do programmers really find so much fun in creating accidental complexity?

I believe only bad (inexperienced) programmers do.