Yes, building cars in a factory yields repetitive results, but what about all the different engineering projects. The truth is that this is not a new problem, we just lack discipline of fields that have been refined over thousands of years.
Because of the quick idea to prototype rate, product research and refinement takes a back seat. All engineering projects have massive research before the first stone is placed. Nobody mid way through building a sky scraper decides "oh, do we need to redo the foundation?"
I would also like to note, nobody is gonna give a self-taught architect who's 19 the ability to build that skyscraper foundation. Each building technique is developed, tested, and then once determined good, is actually used by others, and supervised by an industry veteran with underlings who learn and eventually themselves supervise such projects. Meanwhile in software it is the opposite.
Not to say that there isn't a reason software grows so fast. Things change daily. If software worked like architecture we'd be licensing even the right to use ruby on rails-style modeling. But software works differently, thus faster iteration, thus more loosey-goosey, thus harder to estimate.
> I would also like to note, nobody is gonna give a self-taught architect who's 19 the ability to build that skyscraper foundation. Each building technique is developed, tested, and then once determined good, is actually used by others, and supervised by an industry veteran with underlings who learn and eventually themselves supervise such projects. Meanwhile in software it is the opposite.
It's a bit less black and white: Any 6+ year old might build his own tree house, while in reality no one will let a self-taught kid write the control software for a nuclear power plant.
Yes, building cars in a factory yields repetitive results, but what about all the different engineering projects. The truth is that this is not a new problem, we just lack discipline of fields that have been refined over thousands of years.
Because of the quick idea to prototype rate, product research and refinement takes a back seat. All engineering projects have massive research before the first stone is placed. Nobody mid way through building a sky scraper decides "oh, do we need to redo the foundation?"
I would also like to note, nobody is gonna give a self-taught architect who's 19 the ability to build that skyscraper foundation. Each building technique is developed, tested, and then once determined good, is actually used by others, and supervised by an industry veteran with underlings who learn and eventually themselves supervise such projects. Meanwhile in software it is the opposite.
Not to say that there isn't a reason software grows so fast. Things change daily. If software worked like architecture we'd be licensing even the right to use ruby on rails-style modeling. But software works differently, thus faster iteration, thus more loosey-goosey, thus harder to estimate.