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Oct 01, 2026, 11:32 PM
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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In my experience most software developers have very little understanding of complexity, and mostly ignore it or try to design around it, nor with it. Which is mostly just a function of them needing to work to get by, not to contribute something meaningful to society.
Compared with whom? Complexity in general is a rather elusive concept, and since its effects on software are (usually) cumulative over multiple years, devs working in systems that reward quarterly or annual performance metrics are incentivized to ignore it. I don't think ignoring complexity because your job compels you to is the same as not understanding it.
Most of the devs I've worked with grasp the theory of complexity fairly easily once it's been explained to them, but tend to underestimate their own ability to manage it because they don't account for how their scrum-addled environment impacts the quality of the code they write. They just look on the tangled mess they've wrought and assume the fault is individual, not systemic.
I'm a climate scientist, I've been a web dev, and I've worked with complexity in climate, risk, and management spaces. So, compared to those I guess. I've worked with some software devs who are well aware of complexity concepts, but I've never really seen any of them take a complexity-first approach.
I fully acknowledge that I have a particular perspective, but I struggle to believe that most software devs in generic workplaces are better at complexity thinking than the ones I've worked with, given the content we were working with.
That's fair. I'm not trying to suggest that software development makes one uniquely capable of understanding complex systems, or complexity generally; more that the work tends to involve injecting more and more complexity into systems until they're tottering under their own weight, as the Web is doing now. Managing that complexity ramp (or more often, failing to do so) is a part of maintaining software, and devs should be familiar with the prospect of a project that has morphed into something beyond their expectations.