Over-Engineering Quotes

When I was a student and rushing to finish a project, my gut instinct was usually to keep adding all kinds of features. It's a way of papering over the fact that you haven't quite nailed your concept yet.

In all aspects of our society we overcomplicate things under the guise of making things easier and simpler, when in fact we are doing the opposite.

One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.

Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on.

I've built a tree house; because of my architectural training, it's heavily over-designed, with an oriel window sticking out of it and flying foxes coming off it.

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

Automatic paper towel dispensers are a solution to something that was never a problem in the first place.

I think sometimes when things have too much time to develop you overthink it and you start making changes that aren't necessary.

It's a very strange thing for a designer to say, but one of the things that really irritates me in products is when I'm aware of designers wagging their tails in my face.

If you continue to improve a product enough, you'll eventually ruin it.

Our great committee is too unwieldy for this operation. A great, clumsy machine is applied to the slightest and most delicate operations--the hoof of an elephant to the strokes of mezzotinto.

I did take some value out of looking at the extreme simplicity of implementation that the tight resource limits required. I do feel that modern games are often abstracted a lot more than is really necessary, and it leads to robustness issues.

I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.