Smart graduates often make easy problems hard

When you can't identify which work is actually important, you manufacture difficulty instead. The tell: engineers building custom databases, distributed systems, and Big Data infrastructure for problems a laptop could handle. Hadoop clusters replacing a shell script. Custom real-time databases at Twitter and Uber — technically impressive, but the need was never established.

This isn't stupidity. It's the college playbook running in the wrong environment. A hard problem is what you know how to get an A+ on. If the real problem is boring-but-important, the instinct is to make it technically interesting so you can compete on familiar terms.

The result is work that sounds impressive and moves nothing that matters.

Source claim: Graduates trained to seek difficulty will manufacture it when real problems are simple, producing technically impressive work that doesn't matter.