Complexity
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I have been thinking about complexity for a while now as a measure of “difficulty”. Typically the more complex something is, the more difficult it will be to solve. Naively, complexity is a measure of the amount of stuff you have to solve at the same time. I think mathematicians would call this the number of “degrees”. Anyway, here’s a real world example:
* Brick laying is hard work, but not complex. You have a lot of bricks to lay, but a clear, obvious, and defined path to lay them in.
* Software writing is hard work too, but it is also complex. You have a lot of code to write, but the path is never defined until it’s done. Most of what you do at any one time has an impact on multiple parts of your code base.
Ray Ozzie, CTO of Microsoft says this about complexity:
“_Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration._” (”nytimes”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html?hp&ex=1143435600&en=482f269e6e35b1c3&ei=5094&partner=homepage)
From my experiences, most people don’t acknowledge complexity. This is a worry as most of my experiences have been with software. I don’t think problems come much more complex than those found in software. Anyway, understanding the difference between complex work and hard work is important. If you don’t, some day you will end up looking like upper management at 95% of software companies.
March 27th, 2006 at 5:10 pm