Kill It with Fire

Neal Ford, director and software architect at ThoughtWorks, had a saying I’m fond of repeating to engineers on my teams: “Metawork is more interesting than work.” Left to their own devices, software engineers will almost invariably over-engineer things to tackle bigger, more complex, long-view problems instead of the problems directly in front of them. For example, engineering teams might take a break from working on an application to write a scaffolding tool for future applications. Rather than writing SQL queries, teams might write their own object relational mapping (ORM). Rather than building a frontend, teams might build a design system with every form component they might ever need perfectly styled.