theProjectIWasHired4AfterTheyFiredTheEntirePreviousTeam

big brain energy

I had a kind of opposite case once.

The project where they fired the whole previous team for incompetence was so extremely over-engineered that it was more or less impossible to change even small details without week long effort to cut through all this crazy, unneeded abstractions and complexity.

The point the previous team didn't understand was that if you need to handle natural transformations over higher kinded types just to output some JSON over HTTP from some relational DB you're doing it definitely wrong. If you need whole compute clusters to do task that could run in real-time on some RasPi you're doing it definitely wrong!

It would have taken at least 1.5 years to untangle all this brain dead nonsense which almost required a Phd. in theoretical computer science and math just to be able to read this code.

What happened?

Half a year later the company was bankrupt. They burned in sum around 400 million Euro in VC capital during, just I think, just ~3 years of existence. To be fair not all the money got burned on engineering, even the cloud cost for their joke systems was ridiculous. They were also in banking where you can burn millions in a blink by wrong investments. Still their IT costs were really extreme as also all this shit was orders of magnitude over-engineered. They could have run the whole company on a few smallish dedicated root servers for a few bucks, but instead they used almost any service AWS has to offer. They though the will have soon millions of customers to server even the reality was maybe ~20 customers per day… Needless to say that this shit was so extremely over-engineered that actually all the compute clusters barley handled the load coming from a single user. Shit would not scale even if they payed AWS millions per month, as all the architecture was a gigantic mess. They thought they can design stuff like Google or AWS does just that all this was theory as these people didn't understand basic engineering principles.

The lesson: If you have idiots at work who don't know what they're doing you're doomed.

But idiots who don't know what they're doing don't come always in the form of clueless botchers. They can also come in the form of "hyper intelligent" nerds. People who will always chose the most complex solution available even for the most trivial tasks. Beware of theoreticians!

Only thing I'd change is Try except print exception then pass.