Relying on mere “taste” is bad engineering. Engineers do need experience to make good decisions, yes. But surely we are able to come up with objective criteria of what makes a good abstraction vs. a bad abstraction. There will be trade-offs, as depending on context, some criteria will be more important than other (opposing) criteria. These are sometimes called “forces”. Experience is what leads an engineer in assessing and weighing the different present forces in the concrete situation.

That’s seems like it should be true, and it would be great if it was.

But in my many years of experience working with Jr engineers, I have found no substitute other then practice guided by someone more Sr (who has good taste).

There are just too many different situations and edge cases. Everything is situational. You can come up with lists of factors to consider (better versions of this post often have them), but no real firm rules.

I wouldn’t call that “taste”. It’s not a matter of taste which solution is better. If different engineers disagree about which solution to choose, then it’s fundamentally a different assessment of the relevant factors, and not about taste. Or at least, it shouldn’t be the latter.

I don’t know. We could look for some other word to encode “often sub-conscious though sometimes explicit heuristics developed by long periods of experiencing the consequences of specific trade-offs” but “taste” seems like a pretty good one because it’s quite intuitive.

There often - usually? - are more than one good solution and more than one path to success, and I don’t find calling different good engineers making different choices primarily because of their past experiences an egregious misuse of language.

I think you are going after something that is more an element of craftsmanship than engineering, and I agree it is a big part of real world software development. And, not everyone practices it the same way! It's more of a gestalt perception and thinking process, and that instinctual aspect is colored by culture and aesthetics.

In my career, I've always felt uncomfortable with people conflating software development with engineering. I think software has other humans as the audience more so than traditional engineered products. Partly this may be the complexity of software systems, but partly it is how software gets modified and reused. There isn't the same distinction between the design and the product as in other domains.

Other domains have instances of a design and often the design is tweaked and customized for each instance for larger, complex products. And, there is a limited service life during which that instance undergoes maintenance, possible refurbishing, etc. Software gets reused and reformed in ways that would make traditional engineers panic at all the uncertainties. E.g. they would rather scrap and rebuild, and rely on specialists to figure out how to safely recycle basic materials. They don't just add more and more complexity to an old building, bridge, airplane, etc.

Perhaps there is a better word. But there is a real skill that you pretty much have to learn through experience and mentorship.

Yes, this is what I mentioned in my original comment about experience being needed to weigh the trade-offs. That doesn’t mean that we can’t very concretely speak about the objective factors in play for any given decision. We can objectively say that x, y, z are good about this abstraction and a, b, c are bad, and then discuss which might outweigh the other in the specific context.

Needing experience to regularly make good decisions doesn’t mean that an article explaining the important factors in deciding about an abstraction is useless.

If we used the word "judgement", would that be a better option? It seems that pretty much anyone can write code (even AI), but ultimately in software development, we get paid for judgement.

Is ought fallacy

Folks like to claim that software is Engineering but it’s as much Craftsmanship. Hence, taste is in fact important.

In some areas you need more engineering but API design, for example, is mostly taste and hardly any science.

No kind of engineering ever gets into that "taste-independent" level of formalization.

Yes, it should be this way. But it's not.

Taste amounts to a well trained neural net in the engineers skull. It should not be belittled. Articles like this attempt to describe taste systematically, which is worth attempting but impossible

Maybe not, but you can still move the needle one way or another based on reading an article. For those readers who recognize themselves as erring on the side of adding too many abstractions, they might move the needle a bit towards the other side.