How infrastructure unpredictability affects engineering productivity

In engineering teams, systems often become complex through a series of rational responses to specific problems, a process known as accretion. This occurs when teams add workarounds like caches, queues, or retry mechanisms to address issues such as latency spikes or unpredictable behavior, initially solving immediate problems but ultimately creating a convoluted architecture. Senior engineers are disproportionately affected by this complexity, as they spend significant time addressing production incidents rather than building new features. The challenge is that these workarounds, once implemented, are difficult to remove as they become ingrained in the system's operations, often masking the original issues rather than resolving them. Predictable infrastructure is crucial to reducing cognitive load and enabling engineers to focus on development instead of troubleshooting. To manage and mitigate this complexity, organizations should treat workarounds as temporary, periodically audit layers for relevance, distinguish between essential and defensive complexity, and aim to address the root causes of unpredictability by choosing reliable foundational systems.

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