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You know how weight lifters lift weights, and how useless that activity by itself is except to increase muscle mass, but has ABSOLUTELY no benefit other than that as well as bragging rights, reputation, winning awards and respect?

You really don't dare. Not with co-workers. Even outside working hours.

Understanding this stuff requires stepping outside of the career box. It's pretty much impossible to understand as a normie.

AND IT people are too busy to recognize it when pointed out.

We rattle around a lot on this board bitterly complaining about the industry. How it demeans and denigrates experience, accomplishments, and character.  How developers invent and push new crap continually for absolutely no good reason at all -  even when it's repetitive, broken, isn't really any good, is unwieldy, and/or is unreliable.

Here's the unified field theory on this subject. Please everyone, drop the aspie naivete about human nature... People are ALL motivated by vanity and the need to feel better than the next guy/person....

This means: USELESS HARD WORK - pushing against almost immovable resistance for no good reason except to show your strength - IS NORMALIZED. REINVENTING THE WHEEL IS NORMALIZED. BEING SCORNFUL OF EASIER WAYS IS NORMALIZED.

CS is the process of making things really hard for the next guy to take over your code.

How could all of you people be so obtuse? 

IT'S NOT ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY!!!!!! HELLO. IT'S ABOUT DICK WAVING AND ASSERTING YOUR PURE STRENGTH TO WADE THROUGH SELF CREATED HARDSHIP.

I mean, really. This is observation 101 IF. YOU. JUST. STEP. BACK.

I DEFY ANYONE ON THIS BOARD TO identify ONE, JUST ONE!!!! way that computer science permanently embraced some important simplification that makes things easier.

Also to counter the reaction that "proper businesses just wouldn't accept programmers diddling around wasting time inventing hard stuff to test themselves"... BZZZT BZZZT NAIVE.

Don't be naive. Executives and owners have NO idea that their techies are lying to them, or not. Every techie follows other techies to make their job harder, like a herd.

So executives and owners never see this constant erosion of value in the service of programmer ego and dick-waving. They talk with other owners or executives that are in exactly the same environment.

Young programmers in the game have a de facto monopoly on defining the rules of the playing field. You need them to keep your IT running. And when you have them, they will unwittingly participate in this overall competitive wastefulness.

Last point: Programmers doing this stuff probably have no idea they're doing it. First of all they have no experience to show them that the "improvements" are bullshit. Their experience in industry goes back 3-5 years, not 15-25 years to really see how things get harder for no real reason.

Secondly they  are personally invested in the mindset because they need to keep their job or find a job and lead techies will be as invested as anyone in the waste/mental weight lifting mentality. Programming is a social environment. You have to subscribe to the memes that everyone else does if you want a job.

You WILL see programmers adopt mantras/memes such as DRY (don't repeat yourself) and conserving activities such as reducing verbosity of code.

However, in almost EVERY instance, programmers economize on the surface level complexity of their creations while burying mountains of complex assumptions and defaults under the surface.  Developers tend over time to make things APPEAR simpler, on the surface. But the knowledge required to approach the subject matter always increases.