Concrete symptoms of over-engineering [closed]

I have recently found myself in the position of explaining an (In-House) application I have written to two candidates my company likes to hire in order to assist in maintenance and adding minor features.

It is the first "production" application I have written, it has 45k LOCs and I spent almost two years of "solo" development on it. I am fairly young (18) and wrote the application from scratch while being contracted as stand-in for a former developer who left the company. Unexperienced in designing applications of this size, I tried to use common architecture- and design-patterns.

Today I know I have done some serious over-engineering, e.g. using a disconnected change tracking architecture instead of the Unit Of Work pattern, which the chosen ORM has already implemented. I will probably never have to go "real" three tiers.

Both candidates have 10 years+ background in In-House Application Development with the relevant platform. Being half their age and having little experience I do respect their opinion. When I was explaining the application architecture to them, comments were along the lines of:

• Jeez, no one would pay me to do stuff like that, I have to get things done
• Stick with what the framework does, don't use fancy libraries/technologies
• Don't wrap framework code. On a team, everyone will write his own wrapper code anyway.
• You're using .NET 3.5? Well, we are using 2.0.
• What does that LINQ stuff buy me? All this query composition and projection seems too complicated.

Now I am asking myself:
Am I an architecture astronaut? How do I know I am going too far with architecture? What are common symptoms of over-engineering?

What are common symptoms of over-engineering?

Code that solves problems you don't have.

One very strong warning sign of overengineering is when everything goes through so much indirection that it's hard to find the piece of code that actually implements some concrete, domain-level piece of functionality. If you find that most of your functions do very little concrete work and just call other virtual functions, you may have a problem.

Boredom

Boredom is good precursor to over-engineered code. I'll admit, when I got my first job, I felt so underutilized. I was just bored. And when I got bored, I wrote code. Not just any code -- CATHEDRALS OF CODE.

No seriously, I had a mental picture of my code and abstractions as large towers with golden jutting spires, flying buttresses of glassy onyx, a wonderful vault supporting by arched domes topped with beautiful geometrical tracery, etc etc etc.

It was really fascinating to see the patterns working together for myself, but in retrospect, I am completely ashamed of the ungodly mess I left behind.

If you're writing your own frameworks and DSLs code to while away the less stimulating hours at work, just stop. Time is better spent reading Wards Wiki, or writing an open source book, or you may just want to ask management for more work.