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The single biggest mistake in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Something something Conway’s Law.

I’d add that a significant part of other “hardest problems” cited is the human communication “layer.” This has been true in my experience for naming, caching, and other technical problems. There’s the problem, then there’s communicating about it with humans, which can be harder than the problem.

Feels especially relevant now as most tech companies are dead-set on automating away whatever human communication still existed!

"The whole reason I got into this field was to avoid that. Where would YOU send me given the sole goal of minimizing my human communication?" - somethin' aome of them might genuinely say honestly...

To be honest, this goes for every specialisation in every field, technical or otherwise. It's just that the people in that field only see the issues with others because to them, they are communicating. It's just greek to the rest of us.

thus the crazy impetus to force the humans out of the loop

You forgot 3. Off by one errors

This is what I target as my role in tech - it is surprising to me every time how little time and effort teams will put into demos and documentation. "We dont need those contextual docs - other engineers will be able to determine the usage by its schema" Its not the code, it your feature goals!

I chose a career in computer science specifically to avoid, or at least minimize, human communication

Did this president have an opinion on how come ducks have corkscrew vaginas

Naming things is communication. It is hard, but your point remains outstanding.

I kinda knew that would be the case, which is exactly why I had to add the clarification. Because you really are right.

Because if you start off like that, you must not forget the origin (of the beginning of) this phrase: martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHar...

Technically it should be 0. Off by 1 errors Because then you add in the implicit “counting starts with 0” But yeah we all try to automate ourselves out of a job, and we can’t do it