I don't think he was trying to imply that coding was the only thing that's complicated.

I think it comes back to "No Silver Bullet" and what it has to say about accidental and essential difficulties.

There may be impurities in water, yes, and it can be several temperatures, but water is water is water. It's still chemically two hydrogen atoms connected to a single oxygen. We can define what pure water is. Having that definition allows us to define tolerances for how much "not-water" is in the water. What kind of pipe is necessary to deal with the not-water, etc. The essential difficulties of plumbing and water management are never really about the water, it's about how to deal with not-water.

Same with electricity, the way it moves may be differing, but it's still just electrons. There's no special electricity that will conduct through rubber. Again, we can define what electricity is. And again, having those definitions, we've moved our essential difficulties to the not-electricity part of the problem.

There is no standard "data". We cannot define what data is. Because it kind of is everything. It's a nebulous, abstract concept. It doesn't mean anything on its own. What we really want to do is process subsets of that data. And filtering to that subset is the essential difficulty. And then you have the issue that two consumers of data could want similar data, but not quite. So data's essentially difficulties come sooner and once you've transformed your data into water, you still have more essential difficulties to handle.

Coding includes things like simulating water and electricity, hence it is more complicated.

For example, lets say you want to code to check that your electric setup is right. Then you implement the concepts voltage, current, frequency, DC AC etc, and run it to see what the end result looks like. Coding this is of course more complicated than learning about the concepts in the first place. And as have been said many times before, coding this system is often the easiest part of the job, then you have to add all the helper systems, the UI etc, and that is the really hard part that often is the reason projects fails.

Of course taking electrical engineering in college is way harder than software engineering or computer science, but that is because the software engineering and computer science tracks in college are usually a joke. If you had to be able to code systems as described above then it wouldn't be easier at all.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Electrical engineering is a complex field and may seem easy from the outside simply because of its maturity, but I would argue is the hardest of the engineering disciplines to grasp as well as one of the most important.