Allard Buijze, the CTO and founder of the open-source Axon Framework, recently offered a gentle reminder that sounds almost too simple: it’s far better to build software that can scale than to build it at colossal scale right from day one. You’d imagine this is common sense — the kind of thing we’d have engraved on coffee mugs and office walls — yet in practice, it often feels more like a piece of obscure advice whispered in the wind.

So why, in the face of such straightforward wisdom, do we still see teams funneling time and budget into building elaborate Rube Goldberg machines? These systems are so intricately over-designed that even the simplest problem becomes a grand spectacle of moving parts, bells, and whistles. It’s almost as though achieving genuine simplicity would be too dull, so we spice things up with complexity, convinced that the more complicated it looks, the more brilliant it must be.

It’s easy to dismiss this as rookie ignorance, but ironically, many of the folks behind these overblown architectures are experienced leaders and tech experts who know exactly what they’re doing—until they don’t. There’s a strange cocktail of human impulses, organizational culture, and business anxieties all conspiring to make over-engineering seem not only reasonable but downright sensible. And once you’re caught in the loop, it can be surprisingly hard to claw your way back to sanity.

Why do we end up here so often?

Sometimes, the drive to over-engineer starts with our own human impulses. We want to look brilliant by solving every potential issue in one grand sweep, or we get enchanted by the latest tools and worry about missing out on something revolutionary. We find comfort in the idea of a single perfect fix, even though reality often needs a more measured approach. And once we’ve invested time or budget into a particular path, it’s easy to keep moving forward simply because we’re already in too deep to back out gracefully.

Within organizations, the interplay of culture and politics also creates pressures that encourage over-engineering. Different teams and executives can have competing objectives that unintentionally force architects to cram in features that may never be used. Leadership changes, or a desire to match what big industry players are doing, adds another layer of tension that further inflates how much complexity we decide to build in. In some environments, “going big” or following the latest tech trend is seen as a badge of honor, even if it comes at the expense of long-term sustainability.

On the more tangible side, tight budgets and limited timelines pose tricky trade-offs. It can be terrifying to make a seemingly irreversible choice about a tool or framework if there’s no guarantee of funding for a major overhaul later. That fear of being stuck with the wrong platform can push people to design solutions that try to cover every possibility right from the start. When resources and time windows for major refactoring are uncertain, the instinct to over-prepare becomes hard to resist, even if it leads to an overly complex system that might never fully realize its promise.

So where to now?

If you think about it, not building the big, shiny Rube Goldberg machine is just another way of removing what isn’t strictly necessary. It’s about having the discipline to resist the lure of the latest buzzwords, the courage to postpone major architectural leaps until you actually need them, and the humility to recognize that you might not have all the answers yet. In practice, this is a far tougher challenge than piling on more complexity, because it forces us to confront those ego-driven and fear-based impulses head-on.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Whether you’re a startup fighting for survival or a seasoned enterprise on the hunt for greater efficiency, the essence is the same: build what you truly need today while ensuring you can adapt tomorrow. After all, perfection — and often success — lies not in how many gears and pulleys you manage to cram in, but in how many you manage to leave out.

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