The title of this article doesn't make sense to me, as an engineer, working on a team of engineers.
Complexity is always something we consider - in every team I've ever worked on. DBA's always talk about the complexity of the data. Dev's always talk about the complexity of the code base. And UI Dev's and Designers always talk about the complexity of the UI.
No one understands the cost of complexity better than engineers. We understand the increase in the likelihood of bugs, or the increase in maintenance and refactoring costs. We understanding that making a UI complex means users may have difficulty learning how to complete a task and get frustrated, and we understand the costs of those frustrations.
I'm not sure why this person thinks engineers and product managers don't understand the cost of complexity. In my personal experience, it's always been business and sales people who don't understand how adding a shiny new feature could be harmful in any way.
As an engineer, my personal experience is that most feature creep actually comes from engineers. Marketing usually have the least idea, but engineers usually cause the "death by 1000 cuts".
I think the only time I've seen engineers add feature/code creep is when it's "filling the gaps" that others didn't think of. Many times ideas are presented to engineers in their unfinished format. It's often up to engineers and QA to find the areas where that idea needs to be fleshed out. Fleshing out an idea, I would argue, isn't feature creep but trying to make an added not suck.
Yup. When you've got a system that, as implemented, gets you 99% of the way to a nifty but unrequired feature? It's dreadfully tempting to go that last 1%. But somehow that 1% balloons into being something that you have to support and the UI turns out messier than you expected and yadda yadda yadda.
In my experience, this is usually the project managers. The engineers would love to remove the unused cruft, but the project managers don't see it as beneficial and always make other priorities.
Complexity is always something we consider - in every team I've ever worked on. DBA's always talk about the complexity of the data. Dev's always talk about the complexity of the code base. And UI Dev's and Designers always talk about the complexity of the UI.
No one understands the cost of complexity better than engineers. We understand the increase in the likelihood of bugs, or the increase in maintenance and refactoring costs. We understanding that making a UI complex means users may have difficulty learning how to complete a task and get frustrated, and we understand the costs of those frustrations.
I'm not sure why this person thinks engineers and product managers don't understand the cost of complexity. In my personal experience, it's always been business and sales people who don't understand how adding a shiny new feature could be harmful in any way.