Your nick seemed familiar - now I remember, I read your great comment in "I just want to serve 5TB" earlier today!

I also agree with everything you wrote about simplicity in software development: I'll take almost every time some dirty php scripts running baremetal over Docker + Golang + Kubernetes + Terraform + Gitlab + Saltstack + Prometheus + the new fashionable tool because with so many parts now begging for attention, nothing will get done quickly - if we're lucky and something gets done.

Knowing where to tune the knob is indeed very difficult, and I'm afraid most people now are just doing a cargo cult of whatever google does, except they are not google, and they don't understand the tradeoffs or the possible alternatives.

But at the scale of most companies, it's a folly to sacrifice flexibility and simplicity to some unachievable desire for software perfection!

It's also a very costly hubris: I have been asked way too often to improve the performance after having thown very expansive hardware at the problem, that still performs miserably due to missing the big picture.

The solution was almost always removing the useless parts, or when trying to disentangle the architecture astronaut fancy mess would have been too costly, start from scratch with a saner design: most recently, I replaced a few hundreds java files (and test and stuff) by about 10 lines of bash, and 20 lines of awk.

My work is not fancy, but it works, unlike the previous solution that was going to be ready the next month, every month, for almost a year...

To all those who want to do things like google, maybe apply there instead of over engineering/polishing your CV with fancy keywords at your employer or client expense?

> IME, the predilection to see things as black-or-white is more correlated with age, than gender.

I had noticed this weird pattern, and it was my best explanation even if I didn't like it much, because it's sexist.

But your version seems more plausible (Occam's Razor!), so thanks a lot for taking the time to post!