Today I learned there’s a name for the general version of this idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory

At a certain point in a solution everything you do to optimize (“push”) in one area will cause a negative effect in a different area (“bulge”).

But this is a nice concrete example.

Oh thank you for sharing! I had tried describing this earlier in my career and had call it "The complexity shell game" as in attempts to hide complexity only serve to move it around and to trick yourself it's gone. I would much rather use an existing standardized term, so I'm switching to Waterbed Theory, thank you!

I like minimal irreducible inherent complexity of a problem or a system (waterbed or zero-point would work I guess) and then you can derive some form of a law of conservation of complexity… if you can measure it. You can definitely feel it, though.

edit: see also ‘No Silver Bullet’ and its essential vs accidental complexity; but don’t disregard Kolmogorov, either, even if it isn’t strictly engineering.

My friend calls it the lump under the carpet. You can move it around, but you can never get rid of it.

v interesting. Thanks for sharing. I kept seeing this phenomenon of "no free lunches". TIL about the waterbed theory.

It’s called constraints and tradeoffs yeah