The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

Instead, they should have sold it as more organic and advanced to the customer, and explained why it is so, like the article did...

That would gain them even more respect from the customer, whereas now they merely caved in and looked incompetent of getting it right at first (since the customer nows thinks it's his complains that made them finally do it properly).

In the course of writing the concepts in a dumbed-down format for an instruction machine, context is inevitably lost. You can say "write comments" until you're blue in the face, but it doesn't solve the problem.

Then, someone new comes along, and they don't understand the context, they never knew anything about it before, and you quit 8 months ago. This person must infer the context and determine an accurate conception of the context from the pieces left behind.

The approach taken when one finds themselves in that position is one of the key tells of their skill and experience IMO. Regardless, it seems that if the software got out of the loose demo/messing around phase, it deserves at least some consideration before it's dismissed out of hand as "bad code".

1. Theoretical: chaotic and complex are not the same thing. Organized and tidy are neither the opposite from or excluding complex systems. Some very tidy systems can still be mind-boggling complex. Furthermore Chaotic systems have a single underlying order (it might just be impossible to discern), but they are not complex. Complex systems might have multiple orders, none at all or everything in between.

See for an in-depth discussion: The Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart, Penguin, 2000.

2. Practical: The amount of tidiness in a complex system does not say anything about its efficiency, but neither does its untidiness. Complex systems might be untidy through sunken costs, like most cities are, revolution, evolution, historical accident, or even attempts to make an ordered system (like a system of law) always leaving some gap. The fact that a complex system exists does not say anything about it being efficient or its fitness for purpose. Like the three year old who thinks the mess is beautiful, but cannot find her favorite plush toy.

Changing complex systems is indeed hard, because different subsystems will interact, have feedback loops, create externalities, exclude external information or are near impossible through sunken costs. But that still leaves the calculation of how much the new system or altered system might be more efficient or better than the current system and what the risks involved are.

Tiding up complex systems has risks, but also benefits even if you don't believe the second law of thermodynamics applies to human created systems. Tidied up systems are more easy to reason about and thus can be more easily fixed, adapted or expanded upon. The act of tiding up has the additional benefit of adding to our knowledge about how a system actually works.

3. This guy works for Uber. The cab company with a computer that wants to uproot the current (complex) systems and replace it with something simpler. Yet fails to turn a profit. Do we need to read something into this article, or did he just not realize he contradicts his employers mission?