Surgery is mostly repetitive work with some limited variation. Surgeons can practice what they do until most elements can be done by rote. In contrast, many programming tasks are novel, and the boundaries are constantly being pushed forward. Most things that are repetitive and can be done by rote will be automated by any decent programmer. This is not to justify our mistakes, but there are not many areas where the scope of tasks is as broad and constantly changing as it is in IT.

Some complexity comes from poorly designed and interacting libraries, but they are only so prevalent because of the complexity of the tasks that we have to solve. I have been programming since the 1980s and when I look back at what I used to do it was laughably simpler that what we routinely do today. Sure the lack of tools made it much harder then, but the complexity of our systems was so much less. For an example of this look at the number of lines of code in Linux - Version 0.01 (in 1991) had 10,239 lines of code, version 1.0 (in 1994) had 176,250, by 2.6 (2003) it had 5.9m - by 2015 it has grown to over 19.5m. We are constantly extending our view of what an operating system should be able to do, and the same is true of most things that we write today.

Well I don't speak much French, and while I did study Latin 20 years ago, it is pretty rusty.

Before I posted I checked my micrographically reduced full-text OED for the etymology of these words. Now the abbreviations are sometimes a little difficult to decode so I'll quote them in full.

"[a. Fr. amateur ad. L. amator-em, n. of agent f. ama-re to love.]"

[It. dilettante 'a lover of music or painting', f. dilettare:-L:delectare to delight. So mod.F. dilettante]

I'm willing to accept that I read these wrong but it doesn't really affect my conclusions. It sounds like you know what you're talking about better than I do - what do I know, I'm just an amateur.