There was this wonderful piece about the complexity of Javascript in 2016: https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f

It feels like something similar could be written for any of the thousands of areas and sub-areas of our work. And when you're writing something like a container orchestration system and PaaS to go with it, you might have to touch all of them.

Not only that, but I use many dozens of tools and technologies every day, and each has its own idiosyncratic way of randomly breaking. And sometimes when they break, I have to touch a dozen more technologies to fix it. I have to manage all that complexity while keeping all the theoretical stuff straight, and it is often exasperating.

Software engineering feels like a bottomless pit of complexity, but it's hard to capture in words. I recall a post I found from HN by someone working on a feature for an audio app or library, and why it took 100x longer to write than it might have seemed on first glance. Does anyone remember it?

Does anyone have similar stories to share, or even better, know of any pieces that do a good job of communicating this craziness to non-engineers?

Please also feel free to chime in if you think this is nonsense and it's easy to manage all the complexity.

I also want to add: one of the main benefits of working at a place like Google is that the space is tremendously reduced by virtue of there being many fewer technologies you are allowed to touch. It also has the drawback of leaving some skills very underdeveloped. That's probably worth a separate post on its own.