I have seen this subject come up as the most important factor of human behavior in every one of my employments. Counting both my corporate time and military ti

I have seen this subject come up as the most important factor of human behavior in every one of my employments. Counting both my corporate time and military time that is nearly 50 years employment time at more than 20 different organizations. First things first, complex is a fancy word that means many. That's it, so don't over think it. Everything else is bias and opinions. If you feel conflicted about that see the fantastic Rich Hickey talk: Simple Made Easy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 Secondly, how this actually manifests is that people are eager to solve some problem in a way they feel comfortable, whether by process or automation, and then nobody wants to maintain anything, especially if it was written by somebody else. This is a critical failure. The best solution I have found to solve for this is speed, not code style or anything else. Uncertainty increases proportionally to the duration between testable iterations. For example if it takes 30 seconds to try out an idea and reset back to the prior state people feel more certain about the environment in which they work because risk is low and learning is fast. If, on the other hand, it takes 90 minutes to try out an idea people will be exceedingly cautious about what they try and propose because everything is fragile and expensive. Knowing that speed is the solution is not convincing in a world where most software developers cannot measure anything. Instead it must be mandated that software has only one purpose: automation, so automate the shit out of it. When that becomes the thesis of all work speed naturally self-amplifies and people split into two camps. The first camp is people that can actually write original software and the second camp is people who will kill you with internal processes, such as complexity checks and code style rules, because they cannot automate their way out of it.