"The project has far too many layers of abstraction and all that nice readable code turns out to be worthless crap that never had any hope of meeting the goals much less being worth maintaining over time."
The problem is that once programmers learn something that is "hard" to them, that is, something that demanded from them a big investment some of them then start to believe that anything they touch will benefit from using these hard-to-aquire techniques. That's how we end with "far too many layers of abstraction" and "the nice readable code turns out to be worthless crap." There's a lot of code produced following some recipes, without questioning if the recipes are appropriate to the problem.
Another problem is what I call "religious approach" to programming and design: blindly believing and applying without questioning all that is written in some books. It's an interesting psychological problem that often ends implemented in the code, which often happens due to the often "solitary" approach to design and code writing. If you have "architects" that don't look at the implementation and aren't ready to question and redo their own designs you can be almost sure the result will be ugly and maybe even totally wrong.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2007/02/02/performance...
"The project has far too many layers of abstraction and all that nice readable code turns out to be worthless crap that never had any hope of meeting the goals much less being worth maintaining over time."
The problem is that once programmers learn something that is "hard" to them, that is, something that demanded from them a big investment some of them then start to believe that anything they touch will benefit from using these hard-to-aquire techniques. That's how we end with "far too many layers of abstraction" and "the nice readable code turns out to be worthless crap." There's a lot of code produced following some recipes, without questioning if the recipes are appropriate to the problem.
Another problem is what I call "religious approach" to programming and design: blindly believing and applying without questioning all that is written in some books. It's an interesting psychological problem that often ends implemented in the code, which often happens due to the often "solitary" approach to design and code writing. If you have "architects" that don't look at the implementation and aren't ready to question and redo their own designs you can be almost sure the result will be ugly and maybe even totally wrong.