Unnecessary complexity

The cognitive load in programming just keeps going up for no valuable reason. It all seems like marketing hype.

I've worked on projects with tremendous benefit, built with emphasis on simplicity from their inception. In contrast, I have worked on several projects, seemingly more now than ever before, that feel like they have embraced complexity for its own sake.

So yeah, I totally embrace anti-complexity and minimalism as much as possible, and cannot seem to get much traction with many other developers on that, at least until they have seen for themselves the consequences. There is too much fear in our industry - losing a job is such anxiety, so people choose "job-security" approaches - unnecessary complexity, too many frameworks and tools - because on the surface that looks good for a resume. To the detriment of quality on projects.

I have gone down this road, I am in the midst of developing an application with these concepts in mind, and am finding that the overall experience is quite good. Most of what the frameworks provide just fade into the background, and I mostly just focus on the business logic. It does require having a decent understanding of the foundations of work - for example if one is doing web development, one should have a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and HTTP. Some frameworks try to abstract that all away, but it is inevitably necessary to understand what is happening at those levels in order to best handle maintenance and debugging.