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.
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.