Why We Sometimes Make Coding Harder (and How to Stop)

Let’s be honest—software development is complicated. It’s just the nature of the job. Bugs pop up when you least expect them, deadlines are always tight, and modern software has so many layers of complexity that nothing goes exactly according to plan. But here’s the kicker: we developers often make things more complicated for ourselves without even realising it. And trust me, I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit.

One of the most common traps I’ve fallen into—and I bet a lot of developers have too—is thinking that less typing means less work. It sounds logical at first: if you type less code, you must be saving time, right? But here’s the reality— most of your time as a developer isn’t actually spent typing. I’d say typing takes up maybe 5% of the whole process. The real-time eaters are things like figuring out what the code is supposed to do, understanding the existing system, planning new features, and testing and debugging the heck out of them.

I remember early in my career, I’d get really proud of myself for writing super concise code. “Look how little I typed!” I thought. But then I’d spend hours trying to understand why reusing code that wasn’t exactly right for the job was causing more problems than it solved. Reusing code can be great when working with related features—it saves time and makes things easier to maintain. But when I tried to reuse code that wasn’t designed for the specific problem I was solving, that’s when things got messy.

Here’s where it all goes wrong: you reuse a piece of code because it looks like it does what you need. But soon enough, the two features start diverging, and the code needs to be modified to work slightly differently for each case. I once had a project where this happened—what was supposed to be a minor feature turned into a weeks-long headache because the reused code became an over-complicated mess. We had to test and retest everything, and every time a new developer came on board, they had to spend extra time just trying to understand why that chunk of code was so convoluted.

And that’s the best-case scenario! The worst case is when someone unknowingly tweaks the reused code, thinking they’re only affecting one feature, but they break something completely unrelated. I’ve been that person. The result? Bugs galore and a mountain of frustration. Suddenly, we’re not just dealing with complicated code, but bug-ridden, confusing, overly complex code.

I’ve also seen—and been part of—teams that go too far in making systems “generic” in the name of flexibility. On paper, it sounds like a good idea. Take Amazon, for example. They started with a system for selling books, but they made it generic enough to sell anything, and that worked out great for them. But there’s a fine line between “flexible” and “overly generic.”

I once worked on a content management system where everything was labelled a “node.” Products? Nodes. Comments? Nodes. Blog posts? You guessed it—nodes. At first, it seemed clever. “Hey, everything is a node, so it’s super flexible!” But pretty quickly, it became clear that grouping everything under one vague label just made things harder. Every new feature required more and more exceptions and workarounds because the concept was too generic to be helpful. It didn’t make the system more efficient, it just made it more confusing and harder to work with.

Ultimately, instead of saving time with this “one-size-fits-all” approach, we spent way more time dealing with the added complexity. I’ll never forget that project—by the time it wrapped up, I was convinced that sometimes it’s better to let different things be different.

And look, I get it—we’re always trying to make our code scalable, future-proof, and efficient. But sometimes, we take it too far. I’ve seen developers, myself included, obsess over making things scalable when there’s no need. It’s like building a highway for a village of 50 people. Or we try to optimise every process, shaving off nanoseconds when it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, we overcomplicate the system for problems that may never exist.

So, we developers definitely have a habit of making our jobs harder than they need to be. It’s part of the challenge, but also part of the learning process. Recognising when we’re overengineering or reusing code in ways that will only create headaches down the road has made a big difference in my work. I know I’m still guilty of it sometimes, but at least now I catch myself before it becomes a full-blown disaster. And let me tell you—learning how to avoid these traps can make life a whole lot easier.

Article by Dave