Why Over-Engineering Is a Junior Developer Habit

They don't teach the real world in bootcamps. Get 25 years of production-grade experience on my YouTube: 🛠️👉 https://www.youtube.com/@lessonsfromproduction The most complex code I've ever deleted was written by someone who'd been coding for six months. The second most complex? Written by someone who'd been coding for six months and had just discovered design patterns. Over-engineering isn't a sign of intelligence. It's a sign of insecurity. The Controversial Truth Nobody Will Tell You Not your bootcamp. Not your CS degree. Not even your senior dev in code review. Writing simple code is harder than writing complex code. Every junior developer I've ever mentored — every single one — went through the same phase. They learned about microservices, event-driven architecture, abstract factory patterns, and dependency injection frameworks. And then they rebuilt a to-do app using all of them. That's not skill. That's intellectual showing off. And the worst part? They didn't even know they were