It is complex. There was another posting on HN where commenters were musing over why software projects have a much higher failure rate than any other engineering discipline.

Are we just shittier engineers, is it more complex, or is the culture such that we output lower quality? Does building a bridge require less cognitive load then a complex software project?

I think it's a cultural acceptance of lower quality, happily traded for deft execution, over and over.

We're better at encapsulating lower-level complexities in e.g. bridge building than we are at software.

All the complexities of, say, martensite grain boundaries and what-not are implicit in how we use steel to reinforce concrete. But we've got enough of it in a given project that the statistical summaries are adequate. It's a member with thus strength in tension, and thus in compression, and we put a 200% safety factor in and soldier on.

And nobody can take over the ownership of leftpad and suddenly falsify all our assumptions about how steel is supposed to act when we next deploy ibeam.js ...

The most well understood and dependable components of our electronic infrastructure are the ones we cordially loathe because they're composed in shudder COBOL, or CICS transactions, or whatever.