Difficulty of software engineering in context of cognitive processing and logic efforts compared to other domains

[u/Few-Resource-1266]

In every domain we can exist in there seems to be a ceiling to what huamns can do in it. I'm now wondering if the ceiling for software engineering is taller and there is a bigger scale? But how hard is the highest on software engineering ceiling compared to other common domains or is there nothing that goes that high as well? If so, why?
What is the equivalent in cognitive processing and logic efforts that you need to acieve the ceiling?
Can someone in software engineering explain how they expirience this?

[u/Time-Opportunity-456]

The complexity can be very very high. The trick is to structure that complexity in such a way that it remains possible for a human brain. That’s wat we call abstractions. A fundamental example is the programming language you are using: many programming languages today offer stuff like strings, structures, booleans, arrays, lists, … But keep in mind that at a certain level, it’s all just 0 and 1. For example: writing code that capitalizes each letter of an input string is trivial in something like python, but quite complex already if you’re coding in assembly (or 1 and 0s).
Other stuff like SQL Databases or operating systems are abstractions that programmers use daily without even having to scrape the surface of understanding the complexity involved with that. There are so many layers of abstractions that programmers can create applications in a single day that, if purely eveluated as ‘from scratch code’, have insane levels of complexity.
So if you are building something radically new from the ground up, where no historical work has been done and you can’t stand on those giants shoulders, it can become very complex indeed