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Complexity Is the Enemy
'm almost through my seventh year working at Google(!). I have learned many things there, more than I could ever write down.
On the other side, frequently it's easy to see a benefit of increasing complexity: a new layer of indirection allows new feature X, or splitting a process that ran on one machine into two allows you to surmount your current scaling hurdle. I frequently think back to a friend's comment on the Go compiler written by Ken Thompson: it's fast because it just doesn't do much, the code is very straightforward. Another word for this problem is cleverness: to quote another one of the C hackers, "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
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