This was a discussion in the aviation subreddit too. I am also not an aviator, but just someone with an interest.
What the outcome of the discussion was that it depends on the culture and training of the organisation. It could be possible that it does happen like this 95% of the time with no crash in that specific organisation.
Yes, and the person engaged with them is pointing out that more complex solutions exist because someone added other requirements.
Maybe “I want a configurable chime” is just a less popular requirement than “I want to be notified on my phone even if I'm not at home.”
Also, Excel is famously complex because, despite most users only using 20% of the features, no one uses the same 20%, so if you want cover close to 100% of the market, you need to ship features that are useless to most of your users.
> Yes, and the person engaged with them is pointing out that more complex solutions exist because someone added other requirements.
Precisely.
The Wi-Fi and Linux solution that was called over-engineered just happened to have different requirements. Engineering is a collaboration, not blindly solving very specific problems.
> Excel is famously complex because, despite most users only using 20% of the features, no one uses the same 20%
I think you're comparing 2 very different scenarios here.
Excel is solution engineered to meet every requirement under the sun, for every possible user.
"The doorbell" is something designed and built by 1 person to meet exactly their own requirements.
whstl (the other commenter) insists that he is better suited than the benefiter and builder of that doorbell to decide what is a good requirement and he's willing to make tasteless jokes comparing anyone who doesn't agree with his assessments to Nazis on trial at Nurnberg [1]. You'll notice that whstl didn't even ask why the requirement exists in the first place, just concluded it's wrong (it's something they teach you on day 1 of engineering school, build whatever you want, better if you don't ask questions where the answer might inconvenience you).
When you have a requirement would you take the word of someone on the internet just saying it's not a valid one?
> "The doorbell" is something designed and built by 1 person to meet exactly their own requirements.
Nothing wrong with that.
Also nothing wrong with people going to great lengths to build an Excel replacement that fits their exact requirements like glove, by ignoring 99.9% of what makes Excel … excel.
The issue is calling Excel over engineered for catering to everyone else:
> You would be surprised that 99% of the solutions out there are complete over engineered stacks that depend on wifi devices, Internet access, connecting to various cloud services...
Even if all some people wanted was a custom sound on their doorbells, I bet many of those people will want to transfer the sound using a smartphone rather than an SD card they can't modify with a computer many don't own. And, given that capability, even more people will want to be notified of a ring on their phones, and then why not when they're outside (maybe on the backyard) away from the LAN, and then why not while they're at work, and so on and so forth.
The “over engineered” solutions are actually engineered to cater to everyone else, that is all.
And to make whstl's point: I find it much easier to justify internet and cloud to support a doorbell that's genuinely more useful (rings remotely) than SD cards and custom hardware to justify something as … frivolous as changing the bell's sound.
PS: I just spent $70 modding a $20 Casio watch. I loved every second of it.
About Excel, that’s not what I meant, in my head at least. For any 1 excel user the software looks over engineered. So many complex features not being used... by them. But from the product perspective it probably does exactly what all the users need as a group.
Is a coffee machine with 1000 parts over engineered? For home use yes. For use on the ISS probably not. Context is important, take something out of context and you’ll confidently give the wrong answer.
Anything can be considered over engineered if we just ignore the requirements of the user/builder. Copy from phone? Over engineered with wireless. Copy over SD? Over engineered with a controller. Have a door bell at all? Over engineered with wires.
Start with the goal of the device. Do you want a doorbell with a ring you can choose? SD is probably a lower complexity choice and can’t really go much lower. Do you want a doorbell with internet? Add basic internet connectivity. Unless you do it in a convoluted fashion, with more parts and complexity than needed to achieve that, it's not over engineering.
> And to make whstl's point: I find it much easier to justify internet
I read the opposite. whstl made 2 points for as long as I could be bothered to read his comments: that engineers who implement all the requirements are like Nazi soldiers committing genocide, and that additional features on a doorbell amount to over engineering which is exactly the opposite of what you say.
If you don't need internet, why add it just on a "might as well" basis? The feature creep can go on forever like that. Add a 2-way intercom, video camera with IR and floodlight, some AI recognition stuff, local and cloud backed storage, etc. Now you also created a headache to maintain the software or guarantee it will be in a botnet soon.
Always start with what you need, what’s the goal of the device, and how can you implement that in the most reasonably straight forward fashion as possible. Just so you don’t end up with a doorbell that runs Vmware because "why not".
The original poster claiming "over engineering!" is the one that wants to "just change the ringtone," apparently failing to realize that the products they're comparing too were never meant to "just change the ringtone." (i.e. they need to cater to a wider audience to be successful)
I can't be sure about whstl, but that's my only point.
And, really, nothing against going to great expense/effort to build exactly what one wants. In fact, I love doing just that.
This seems to be paying lip service to creating a supply chain in the USA. These are not anything like Apple Silicon ARM chips, they are not even Wifi chips?
I figure supply chain migration is an incremental process and any progress is a win. In my mind some of the tech needs genuinely experienced staff and that must be seeded somehow.
Note I am talking out of my ass but this is how I see the picture. I have no experience in supply chain or manufacturing :)
I have 15 years experience working in high tech electronics manufacturing (for a global firm with factories around the world, including in the US and China) and can tell you the most difficult thing to manage is the supply chain. For time as much as cost, but if you have to ship a $.10 component 6000 miles to get it to a factory, it's pretty dang inefficient.
That said, you're right about cultivating new experience in younger generations. It's probably not surprising to hear that the majority of factory workers in the US are GenX or older.
but wouldn't that give more opportunities for local students? The disadvantage is, they come, learn, leave, and take what they've learned to benefiting a competing nation, sort of training your replacement. Also, there is the security and IP theft aspect. What are the benefits?
The benefits are recruiting the best and brightest students from a pool of 8b people instead of only 300m people. And some of them (most, if encouraged?) will stay in the US after that and contribute to the economy.
I can't believe we need to rehash these tired arguments every time this is discussed. At this point, I'm convinced that some people are too jingoistic and simple-minded to believe the immense benefits that attracting the smartest people in the world has for the US.
"In 2018, there were 91 unicorn companies in the U.S., and 50 of them (or 55%) had an immigrant founder. Just eight years later, in 2026, those numbers increased to 775 U.S. unicorn companies (as of April 2026), and 455 (59%) have at least one immigrant founder"
a huge amount of American graduated aren't able to find work after graduation with a significant number of jobs going to foreigners. that seems problematic to me we should be putting Americans first not importing people to do the job they spent years training for.
There's an odd idea that increasing the number of educated people in the country makes it harder to find jobs. Where is it easiest to find software jobs? Probably san francisco. You'd think it'd be easiest in some small town in idaho where you'd be the only software developer, right? You'd have no competition! But instead it's the easiest where all the other software developers are. The causation is two-way. Software developers go to san francisco because that's where jobs are, and companies start in san francisco because that's where software developers are.
That's agglomeration effects, and it disproves the idea on its own. If america is the place where all the talented engineers and scientists go, that is a very very good thing for engineers and scientists in america. Or you are free to go try to be an engineer or scientist in estonia, and see if you make more money due to the lack of competition. (Most top engineering and science talent in estonia leaves for other countries, which by your logic should be amazing for the remaining domestic talent.)
Big part of problem is that many companies hire foreigners not because it is "easier", it is not, but because they pay them little while holding in visa slavery.
On top of that, the way they hire foreigners and provide permanent residence path to them is straight fraud: they put job ads into some local newspaper no one reads to prove there is no local competition for the opening.
Some people don’t understand the difference between testing and use. You can afford to test when your launches cost 1/100 of SLS launches instead of risking human lives. Artemis II was human rated with zero launches of its life support equipment, modeling failures of its heat shield, multiple power issues in its only predecessor flight in space. Starship will carry humans after hundreds of launches and landings.
I don't believe that to be true. Starship may host humans next year if it can get to a stable orbit and manage to demonstrate sufficient control for docking. It is extremely unlikely to demonstrate any environmental control before that.
What the outcome of the discussion was that it depends on the culture and training of the organisation. It could be possible that it does happen like this 95% of the time with no crash in that specific organisation.
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