You can definitely go overboard for work. If you want to do it as a hobby, go nuts, but there isn't a point in overengineering far beyond what is needed (recall the Juicero)

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taberiand 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Overengineering is building a bridge that will stand 1000 years when 100 will do; it's excess rigor for marginal benefit. Juicero wasn't overengineering, it was building a crappy bridge to nowhere with a bunch of gaudy bells and whistles to try and hide its uselessness and poor design, that collapsed with the first people to walk over it

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AlotOfReading 5 days ago | parent [-]

Have you looked at a Juicero teardown [0]? It's overengineered to the point where it's a genuinely astonishing bit of engineering art. It's also an incredibly stupid product. Those things are completely compatible.

[0] https://blog.bolt.io/juicero/

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monocasa 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Idk, it looks like most of what this person is complaining is that they don't see a lot of this in high volume consumer products. But like, most high volume comsumer products don't have to crank nearly the same amount of torque either.

It's a silly product, but as far as being over engineered, it looks like it's about what I'd expect for those requirements.

	▲	michaelt 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Have you ever changed a tyre on a car? If so, you may have noticed the jack you used didn't have several huge CNC machined aluminium parts, a seven-stage all-metal geartrain, or a 330v power supply and it probably didn't cost you $700. Probably it cost more like $40. And sure, a consumer kitchen product needs to look presentable and you don't want trapping points for curious little fingers. But even given that, you could deliver a product that worked just as well for just as long at a far lower BOM cost.
	▲	AlotOfReading 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Something is overengineered for the actual problem even if it's necessary to meet the requirements, if the requirements are themselves unnecessary. Imagine speccing a 100m span to cross a small stream. The resulting bridge can reasonably be called overengineered. You can achieve the same goal (getting juice from diced fruit without cleanup) much easier with different requirements. The post mentions that.

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joshvm 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

AvE’s Juicero teardown is also a classic:

https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ?si=V-LLVn1cQmrMsiDZ

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stouset 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The pendulum has swung so far in the direction opposite of going overboard it’s almost laughable. Everyone retells the same twenty year old horror stories of architecture astronauts, but over a nearly thirty-year career I have seen precisely zero projects that failed due to engineers over-engineering, over-architecting, and over-refactoring.

I have however seen dozens of projects where productivity grinds to a halt due to the ever-increasing effort of even minor changes due to a culture of repeatedly shipping the first thing that vaguely seems to work.

The entire zeitgeist of software development these days is “move fast and break things”.