Beware the Complexity Merchants

Summary

Beware the Complexity Merchants May 15, 2025 Complexity is the Enemy of ValueThe Darker Side of Accidental ComplexityA Path to Undoing ComplexityClosing Thoughts Something I’ve come to appreciate over my engineering career is simplicity and how it is an enabler of speed and creation. Scott Carey wrote a great essay on this: Complexity is killing software developers: “Complexity kills,” Lotus Notes creator and Microsoft veteran Ray Ozzie famously wrote in a 2005 internal memo. “It sucks the life out of developers; it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test.” We have all felt this friction at some point in our careers where seemingly simple tasks are met with painful papercuts wrought by complexity. (It often reminds me of that scene in the movie Saw where one of the captives has to dive into a pit of needles to find a key.) Fred Brooks famously made the distinction between complexity of the “accidental” and “essential” kind thinking, at the time, that many advancements had rooted out much of the accidental complexity in software engineering. Brooks might be quite disappointed at the reality that we face today. From that same article, Carey quotes: Justin Etheredge, cofounder of the software agency Simple Thread, helpfully differentiates between essential and accidental complexity. He told InfoWorld, “Essential is the complexity in the business domain you are working in, the fact that enterprises are extremely complicated environments, so the problems they are trying to solve are inherently complex. The other area is accidental; this is the complexity that comes with our tooling and what we layer on top when solving a problem.” This distinction probably spells out the reason you’ve read this far: because you too, know the frustration of having to deal with accidental complexity while trying to solve the valuable problem of the essential complexity. The challenge is that when a group of smart engineers are gathered, it can often be a difficult exercise of dis...