[sureshn]

I have noticed several developers deliberately introduce accidental complexity for the sake of job security. Just to make it really really hard for a new person to do any thing with it , they create a hostage situation where you have to do a full gut of his or her work and redo it. This is more evident in a situation where the teams are geographically distributed and the main team (typically in USA) feels insecure that their jobs are going to India or some other country where software maintenance is cheaper. The problem of accidental complexity is very serious for large enterprise software companies who have aging products typically on a Microsoft stack so those engineers who have spent a decade coding and maintaining it tend to be happy with a crooked way(hacks and workarounds - Undocumented of course) of doing things which gives them an unfair advantage. To conclude; accidental complexity is a political tool introduced by developers deliberately of reasons best known only to them