I was already going to write that this is a beautifully written comment, and then the high praise at the end sealed the deal! Thank you! I must confess that I am still in the reactionary phase of having watched Simple Made Easy two years ago, and am relentlessly trying to remove complexity, but your comment made me think about whether I've gone too far the other way. Complexity is frustrating because it is frequently the result of bad choices (at least where I work), but the ability to handle it probably is a fair marker for excellence.

"Make it simpler" isn't an option sometimes, and I still instinctively flinch away from those instances.

Oh, and the description of "empathy" as really being the willingness to engage with a kind of complexity is a very beautiful parallel between the worlds of software engineering and being a decent human being. I really love that.