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Re:Ask HN: Is Accidental Complexity Growing Faster Than Esse... by jjoonathan on Monday March 27, 2017 @12:16AM (#13965142)
They're both bad, of course, but beyond that I'd say they're nearly antonyms. Premature optimization trades structure for performance, overengineering trades performance for structure.

You could argue for equivalence under a broader definition of optimization and engineering, but in the context of software engineering the more specific definitions used above seem to be fairly well established.

Re:Ask HN: Is Accidental Complexity Growing Faster Than Esse... by rhizome on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @11:04PM (#13983012)
Premature optimization trades structure for performance, overengineering trades performance for structure.

This makes them the converse of each other, but not antonyms. At any rate, I'm not sure I agree those terms are exclusive to this relation. There can be fast overengineering and slow PO.