This describes what i've read about Microsoft internals.
this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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The article makes a point about a certain type of workplace vampirism - which also finds its way into the finished product - but also points out that there are different types of complexity and they aren't all "bad". It's a little confusing to read imho.
But I get the point. I am by no means an IT person but I just took over a blog theme and I'm apalled by the minified CSS framework the whole thing relies on. Looking at the margins for some divs, they are defined and overridden 4 times before their final value, and only the 5th time could have been avoided had the original developer known a little more about the framework they were apparently eager to use.
Anything UI is kinda bullshit because HTML and CSS were never designed to produce pixel-perfect fidelity on every screen but companies insist, and also jank like text shifting just slightly when you hover your mouse over it is bad UX. So what we wind up with is a fifty-level hierarchy of containers making sure everything lined up just so. That complexity is imposed by the intersection of HTML, CSS, and JS. Not that the previous developer wasn't an idiot, but I freaking hate front end work despite being "full-stack."
I'm a big fan of the manta "Make your designs as simple as possible and no simpler". Pointless complexity drives me nuts, but others take it too far and remove functionality by making things too minimal. It doesn't help that a lot of businesses optimize for people who make changes, so the positive feedback loop is change for the sake of change rather than improving the product.
My job has a 3rd kind of complexity, non-essential complexity, which is like essential complexity in that it comes from the business domain, but isn't actually required. It's non-technical decisions about how our apps and services must function that introduce all our complexity and massively complicates our code bases. At one point we literally have to attempt to predict the future because they adamantly refuse to simply ask the customer what they're planning.