I keep reading this online but never encounter it in real life. People I work with and for like simple solutions that don't add complexity. It saves them time and money. I really wonder how is it that some people seem to encounter this toxic mentality so much that they assume it is universal. Is it a FAANG/US culture thing where everyone acts based on corrupted incentives?

I recently had a performance review at a FAANG. One engineer on my team has spent the past 3 years working on a complex infrastructure migration which involved about 20 engineers. The migration was completed last year and saved the company some opex costs.

I on the other hand spent 3 weeks optimizing our core service and reduced 2x the opex costs of the large complex 3 year migration.

In my yearly review my manager acknowledged my impact, but said I need to solve more complex problems to get to Staff Engineer. I protested saying that my 3 weeks of work had a larger impact than 20 engineers over 3 years, but he told me that is just how it works.

It's the definition of simple that's the problem. For any definition of simplicity you might have, someone has an equal and opposite definition.

Take these two alternatives:

  class UserService {
    PostgresDatabase db;
  }

  class UserService {
    IDatabase db;
  }

There are some coworkers who will veto the second example for being too complex, because Postgres is all you use for now, and if you really need to use a second database, you can change the code then (YAGNI). Also the Interface gives you a pointless indirection that breaks IntelliSense so you can't just 'click-through' to follow the code flow.