The 80/20 Rule of Software Engineering: Build Less, Ship Smarter

Spoiler alert: Your overengineered masterpiece is probably overkill.

There’s a dirty little secret in software engineering that no one wants to say out loud — 80% of your features are probably useless. Yeah, I said it. The feature you just spent two sprints refining? Your user didn’t even notice it. That dark mode toggle that took three days to perfect? Karen from accounting is still using Excel.

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Welcome to the 80/20 Rule of Software Engineering, where 20% of your effort drives 80% of the value — and the rest? It’s just developer therapy disguised as “necessary complexity.”

But We Need This Feature.™

Ah yes, the infamous product meeting chant:
“We need this!”
“This is critical for enterprise customers!”
“If we don’t build this, our competitors will!”

Except… no one actually uses it.

Here’s a revolutionary idea:
Stop building everything. Start building smarter.

Engineers are notorious for gold-plating codebases. Every startup begins with a lean MVP. Fast-forward 6 months and suddenly your app has a microservices architecture, Kafka pipelines, four layers of abstraction, and a performance bottleneck that could be solved by just using a damn JOIN.

Why? Because we confuse clever engineering with value.

Shipping Is a Feature Too

You know what users actually love?
When the product works.
When it loads fast.
When they can click a button and things happen.

What they don’t love?
Your overly-abstracted, preemptively-scalable, 15-service solution for a user base of 300.

You don’t need Kubernetes for your to-do app. Calm down, DevOps.

The Cult of Complexity

Too many teams fall into what I call the Cult of Complexity:

• “Let’s add a configurable rules engine!”
• “We need a plugin-based, event-driven architecture!”
• “What if users want to customize their workflows with YAML?”

Nobody wants to customize workflows with YAML.
Nobody.

The truth? Simple software is harder to write. It forces clarity. It removes ego. It means saying no to cool-but-pointless ideas.

What Smart Shipping Looks Like

• Focus on the core 20% features that solve real user pain.
• Get those features into users’ hands fast.
• Use feedback to refine, not fantasies to overdesign.
• Optimize the experience, not your ego.

Smart engineers aren’t the ones who write the most code.
They’re the ones who delete the most code — because they figured out what doesn’t need to exist.

Controversial Take? You Bet.

I get it. This rubs some developers the wrong way. We love our architecture diagrams and pet abstractions. We want to be proud of our codebase — even if it’s unreadable to everyone except ourselves and Stack Overflow.

But here’s the question:
Are you building for users or for Hacker News karma?

Because the market doesn’t care how elegant your service boundaries are. It cares if your product solves a problem and doesn’t crash.

TL;DR: Build Less, Ship Smarter

The 80/20 Rule isn’t just a cute productivity hack. It’s the key to sane software development.
Spend your energy where it counts.
Build what matters.
Ship. Learn. Iterate.
Repeat.

And for everything else?
Delete it. Archive it. Or better yet, don’t build it in the first place.

👋 Agree? Disagree? Want to flame me in the comments?