![]() Will this cycle go on forever, though? I’m not so sure. For all its wastefulness, inefficiency, and pure mendacity (“The old code works fine!” “No wait, the old code is terrible!”), this is the model that has sustained a lot of software companies over the past few decades. The old system is sunset or deprecated, the haggard veterans who worked on it either leave or are reshuffled to other projects, and a fresh-faced team is brought in to, blessedly, design a new system from scratch.Īs disappointing as it may be for those of us who might aspire to write the kind of software that is timeless and enduring, you have to admit that this system works. A new band of architects is brought in, and their solution to the “big diagram of boxes and arrows” problem is much simpler: draw a big red X through the whole thing. At some point, though, an organizational shakeup probably occurs – a merger, a reorg, the polite release of some senior executive to go focus on their painting hobby for a while. “EKS is being deprecated at the end of the month for Omega Star, but Omega Star still doesn’t support ISO timestamps.” We’ve all been there. Nobody can subtract from the system everyone just adds. They might wheel out a big whiteboard showing a lot of boxes and arrows pointing at other boxes, and inevitably, their solution is… to add more boxes and arrows. Architects are brought in to “fix” the system. A legacy system exists: it’s big, it’s complex, and no one fully understands how it works. What I find fascinating about this (besides the obvious implications for modern civilization) is that Tainter could have been writing about software.Īnyone who’s worked in the tech industry for long enough, especially at larger organizations, has seen it before. At some point, the morass they’ve built becomes so dysfunctional and unwieldy that the only solution is collapse: i.e., a rapid decrease in complexity, usually by abolishing the old system and starting from scratch. Even when each new layer of complexity starts to bring zero or even negative returns on investment, people continue trying to do what worked in the past. But at a certain point, the law of diminishing returns sets in, and each new level of complexity brings fewer and fewer net benefits, dwindling down to zero and beyond.īut since complexity has worked so well for so long, societies are unable to adapt. Early on, this makes sense: each new level of complexity brings rewards, in terms of increased economic output, tax revenue, etc. As civilizations grow, they add more and more complexity: more hierarchies, more bureaucracies, deeper intertwinings of social structures. ![]() In his analysis, Tainter found the primary enemy of these societies to be complexity. His goal was to answer a question that had vexed thinkers over the centuries: why did such mighty societies collapse? ![]() In it, he described the rise and fall of great civilizations such as the Romans, the Mayans, and the Chacoans. In 1988, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter published a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies.
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