You know that feeling. You’re three hours into designing a solution. There are diagrams now. Maybe a spreadsheet mapping dependencies. You’ve considered edge cases that have a 0.3% chance of occurring. The voice in the back of your head is whispering something, but you’re not listening because you’re too busy adding another layer of abstraction.
The voice in the back of your head is saying: this is too much.
You ignore it. You keep building.
I’ve been there. Many times. So I built a quiz to externalize that voice.
Sometimes you need permission to stop. To ship the simple thing. To admit the elaborate solution is serving your ego more than the problem.
The Quiz
Am I Overengineering This? is exactly what it sounds like. A few honest questions. An answer you probably already know but need externalized.
It’s not scientific. It’s not comprehensive. But it’s what we need.
Why We Do This
Overengineering is seductive. It feels like thoroughness. It feels professional. And it’s more intellectually interesting than the boring solution that would actually work.
I’ve watched myself do it. I’ve watched teams do it. The pattern is always the same:
The Just-In-Case Architecture. “But what if we need to scale to 10x volume?” You won’t. And if you do, you’ll rebuild it anyway because your assumptions were wrong. This site? I started by planning for thousands of readers who don’t exist. I had to pare it back to building something just for me.
The Resume-Driven Development. Using the new shiny thing because it’ll look good on your LinkedIn, not because it’s the right tool. I’ve definitely never done this. (I have absolutely done this.)
The What-If Spiral. You start handling edge cases for edge cases. The spec grows. The timeline slips. The original problem gets buried.
The Avoiding-The-Boring-Part Maneuver. Sometimes overengineering is just procrastination in disguise. Building the architecture is fun. Migrating the data is not. So you keep architecting. I can’t tell you how many tweaks, additions, and easter eggs I’ve added to this site instead of, you know, writing things.
A Confession
A few years back, I built a lead scoring model in Marketo with over 40 scoring triggers. Behavioral, demographic, firmographic. Page visits, email engagement, form fills, company size, industry, job title patterns, recency decay, probably the phase of the moon.
It was beautiful. It was also unmaintainable. When I left, I’m pretty sure it got replaced with “did they fill out a demo request form? Yes = hot lead.” I like to imagine the scream from the new MOps hire when they first found it.
That simpler version probably worked just as well.
The Point
The quiz won’t tell you anything you don’t know. But sometimes you need permission to stop. To ship the simple thing. To admit the elaborate solution is serving your ego more than the problem.
So: Are you overengineering it?
Yeah. Probably.
Ship it anyway. Or don’t. I’m sure it’ll be great.