The intellectual junior syndrome is a condition that primarily affects junior developers. Fresh graduates, people with a couple of years of experience, and especially the most motivated ones.
It usually appears shortly after someone realises that software engineering is not just about making things work, but about doing things properly. They start reading. The whole lot: the books, the blogs, the forums.
They now know what a visitor is. They know what a monad is. They know what hexagonal architecture is. They know the SOLID principles by heart.
And then they get a job and a problem to solve. Not a university assignment. Not a kata. A real, messy, slightly boring business problem.
And they solve it.
In ten lines.
Very smart lines.
It’s not just a solution. It’s a framework. It’s generic. It’s extensible. It solves not just this problem, but fifty potential future problems.
There is recursion. There is reflection. There is an interface to define the contract. There is a generic type parameter with a name nobody understands. And the whole thing lives inside a beautifully abstract method called something like process, handle, or execute.
It’s elegant. It’s minimal. And it solves fifty problems.
Forty-nine and a half of them are imaginary.
The remaining half is the actual problem you asked them to solve.
And only half of that behaviour is correct.
The intellectual junior syndrome is a serious condition. In most cases it fades with experience, but in some cases it becomes chronic and persists well into senior years.
Clinical Observations
Over the past months, I’ve observed several patients presenting clear symptoms of the intellectual junior syndrome. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Junior A
Junior A is confronted with a simple conditional flow: a switch statement with three cases.
Their immediate thought: replace it with a strategy pattern.
Now we have three classes, one interface, a factory, and a dependency injection configuration.
The original problem had three branches.
The new solution has eight files.
The code is now “more extensible”. Nothing has extended.
Junior A never got the chance to finish the implementation. He was given medication and told to rest.
Junior B
Junior B notices that two different flows share the same two lines of code.
They decide to redesign the entire module around an abstract base class.
The abstract class is used like a utility class. Nothing is overridden. No polymorphism is needed.
Two weeks later, a third flow appears.
It doesn’t fit the hierarchy.
Now the module needs to be redesigned again.
Junior B is currently under observation.
Senior A
Senior A proposes introducing a strategy pattern for something that could be solved with a single if.
A new analysis is requested. Similar incidents have been reported before.
Senior A was also given medication and told to rest.
At this point, it becomes clear that the syndrome is not always cured by time.
Senior A (again)
Senior A, in a Spring Boot application, presents an urgent proposal: implement a bespoke JSON parser.
Clinical interview reveals no current requirement. The justification is purely prophylactic:
“What if one day we need special handling?”
Diagnosis is confirmed. Quarantine protocol has been applied.
Books Are Not the Pathogen
It’s important to clarify one thing: the problem is not theory.
The intellectual junior does not suffer from reading too much, but from not yet knowing what to do with what they have read.
Understanding design patterns is essential. Knowing architectural styles is useful. Learning about functional programming, object orientation, or system design is valuable. None of that is wasted effort.
In fact, much of what modern frameworks do is exactly this: they embed decades of design patterns so you don’t have to reimplement them every time. Frameworks like Spring Boot or Quarkus, for example, hide a huge amount of complexity behind sensible defaults and conventions.
The problem starts when theory becomes a hammer and every problem starts looking like a nail.
Sometimes you really do have fifty different concerns in the same piece of code. Sometimes you really do need multiple layers of abstraction. Sometimes you really do need to introduce patterns explicitly.
But recognising those situations requires something theory alone does not provide: context, experience, and judgement.
And that is precisely what the intellectual junior has not accumulated yet.
The Cure Is Simplicity
The uncomfortable truth behind all of this is that the cure is not more knowledge. It is simplicity.
And simplicity is hard. Not trivially simple code, but code that is simple because it only solves the real problem and nothing else.
Creating that kind of simplicity requires knowing exactly what you need. And to know that, you need to understand the world you’re working in.
- Maybe you won’t over-engineer something that the framework already does for you, but for that, you need to actually understand the framework.
- Maybe you won’t invent imaginary problems, but for that, you need to understand the business context and what problems actually exist.
- Maybe you won’t design complex infrastructure abstractions, but for that, you need to understand how your deployment, platforms, and tooling already behave.
Simplicity is not a lack of knowledge.
It is the result of a lot of knowledge applied with restraint.
And for a junior, that’s genuinely hard. Not impossible, but hard. It requires mentoring, exposure, and a willingness to learn things that go far beyond the tasks they are assigned.
That part is normal.
The bigger concern is the seniors who never respond to the treatment. They accumulate patterns, frameworks, and rules - but not context.
They stay inside a very narrow technical world and become evangelists of practices rather than observers of reality. At that point, the syndrome takes a form of its own. It no longer just affects the host - it starts trying to contaminate others.
And then the final symptom appears: future-ology.
“What if we need this later?”
“What if this grows?”
“What if requirements change?”
The problem is that humans are terrible at predicting the future. If we were good at it, we’d probably be better off buying lottery tickets.
In practice, when a simple case becomes complex, it is far easier to refactor a switch with three branches than to untangle a whole architecture that was built for problems that never existed.
The senior who is never cured often doesn’t even get the chance to be cured.
They move from project to project, design a skeleton, introduce patterns, create abstractions, and then leave to evangelise somewhere else.
And the team that stays behind is left with a solution that was never really designed for their world, their constraints, or their actual problems.
Just for someone else’s imagination of the future.
Discharge Notes
There is no shame in juniors who over-engineer. Many of us have suffered from the syndrome at some point. I was clinically diagnosed.
And honestly, I would still much rather work with a junior who reads too much and overthinks everything than with one who couldn’t care less. The first one at least has the curiosity and the motivation. The second one has already given up before learning anything.
As a former patient, I only really got a chance to recover when I was moved to projects full of dead code left behind by seniors like the ones described above. After repeatedly hitting my head trying to fit a simple if into a hundred files of unnecessary abstractions, I slowly learned something important: most of the time, I would save far more time by understanding the business and removing code than by adding more.
And when removing it was not possible, I was left with a quiet, internal resentment towards the people who had already moved on.
Now, as a senior - cured of this syndrome, but probably afflicted with others - I try to push a slightly different perspective.
Writing code is the easiest part of our job.
Understanding what is the minimal code we need to write is the hard part.
And to get there, they don’t just need to learn languages, patterns, and frameworks. They need to understand a bit of everything: the business, the infrastructure, the constraints, the people, and the history of the system.
Because anyone can build something.
Figuring out what not to build takes longer.
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