The quotes referenced in this article “Whether something is complicated is in the mind of the beholder" and "The total complexity of a system is a constant" appear to me to be contradicting. How can the complexity be both relative and constant simultaneously? Personally, I favor the former. An operating system, for example, seems to me to dramatically lower total complexity since a few hundred (thousand?) people can maintain it. Meanwhile, without operating systems how many hundreds of thousands of people would it take to maintain our modern tech if we all had to work on bare metal?
Maybe there is no link between something being complicated and it's complexity.
One is entirely subjective and the other isn't.
Example: a typical CLI application might be incredibly complicated to my mother, while it is in fact much less complex than e.g. a GUI software she uses to make and order picture books, which to her is much less complicated.
Something being complicated to someone doesn't mean it is complex. Very simple things can be complicated, very complex things can be simple.
