We need to talk about the elephant in the room: the sheer volume of unnecessary stupidity in our industry.

I'm not talking about junior developers making mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. I'm talking about experienced people making the same terrible decisions over and over, defending them with buzzwords, and then acting surprised when projects fail.

The Greatest Hits of Professional Stupidity

Microservices for a three-person team. You have 200 users. You don't need twelve services communicating through a message bus. You need a monolith and a good night's sleep.

Rewriting the entire codebase in the hot new language because the existing one is "legacy." The existing system works. Your users don't care what language it's written in. Your investors care that you just burned six months shipping nothing.

Adopting SAFe. Just... why? You took something simple and made it complicated. Congratulations.

Estimating in story points and then converting them back to hours in spreadsheets. You're not fooling anyone. Just use hours.

Building your own authentication system. Stop it. Use a library. Use a service. I don't care. But stop writing your own JWT validation logic in 2025.

Kubernetes for a single container. You're running one web app. You don't need orchestration. You need a VPS and systemd.

Concatenating strings into SQL queries. It's 2025. We've had prepared statements for decades. Your "it's just an internal tool" excuse doesn't make SQL injection acceptable.

The Real Problem

The stupid thing isn't the technology choice. It's the inability to ask "why?"

Why do we need this? Why does this solve our actual problem? Why can't we do something simpler?

"Because that's how [BigTechCo] does it" is not an answer. BigTechCo has 10,000 engineers. You have eight.

What To Do Instead

Stop cargo culting. Stop resume-driven development. Stop confusing complexity with competence.

Start asking whether each decision makes the system simpler or more complex. Start valuing boring, working solutions over exciting, broken ones.

The smartest developers I know write the least clever code. They solve problems without creating new ones. They ship.

Everything else is just noise.