Comment by rednafi

Every abstraction simplifies a bunch of real-world phenomena. The real world is messy, our understanding keeps shifting, and we’re unreliable narrators in the sense that we’re often not even aware of the gaps in our own understanding, let alone good at expressing it.

No matter how much progress we make, as long as reasoning about complex systems is unavoidable, this doesn’t change. We don’t always know what we want, and we can’t always articulate it clearly.

So people building software end up dealing with two problems at once. One is grappling with the intrinsic, irreducible complexity of the system. The other is trying to read the minds of unreliable narrators, including leadership and themselves.

Tools help with the mechanical parts of the job, but they don’t remove the thinking and understanding bottleneck. And since the incentives of leadership, investors, and the people doing the actual work don’t line up, a tug-of-war is the most predictable outcome.