Software is a focus intensive industry

Programming is really unusual in that it doesn't have the "profession" structure of doctors, lawyers etc - nor does it have the classic Taylorist assembly line. What does characterise it is traditional companies trying to structure it that way and being absolutely obliterated in the market by "outsider" companies doing things with smaller, less hierarchical teams.

At one edge it resembles (and competes for hiring with) the "quant" side of financial trading. Also a focus-heavy industry.

Here I disagree. Doctors? It seems true.. But school teachers and accountants? Nope..

I don't really think these fields compare, unless your 'software' is limited to doing some outsourced CRUD work..

However much people tout against it, I believe software engineering is closer to any other engineering (say Mechanical) than it is to other fields. Our task is solving problems in efficient ways, and optimizing things for one thing or another. Except these days unfortunately the bar seems very low..

They are doing some of the same things, not all of the same things. The ways they are different is obviously important.

Software development requires a level of precision found only in other engineering disciplines, because computers are pedantic and unforgiving. Biological systems, like those dealt with by doctors and teachers, are forgiving and robust. For instance, most medical interventions at the family doctor level are actually unnecessary [1].

That said, software development is far from the hardest field.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medical-procedure...

- teachers : if you have let's say 30 students, you need one teacher, in you have 300 you probably need 10 teachers. I don't know how can you one person deal with 300 students giving them the required attention. Since you have the school program you can start paralyzing the tasks. - doctors : If you have 10 sick peoples... 1 doctor, with 100 you probably need 10 doctors. A doctor need time with a single patient to study the case.

There is probably plenty of good examples, but not that ones. About building softwares, even if you pick the right guys and split the task properly (which requires peoples, time and a high level of understanding) and let peoples work on their own, you lead to inconsistency. Splitting an existing task to add new developers and save time requires redesign and headaches to avoid incompatibilities, probably breaking new things or requiring some rework in the work done by the others.

Use bold, italics, text-marker effects instead.

> Software is not labor-intensive. Not many people are necessary in order to produce good software.

Not many people are needed to produce 500gr of good rice. And lots of people are needed to produce something like all the software Google or MS maintains.

The specialty of software is the low cost of marginal products. This is the new thing here, not labour intensiveness.

> On the contrary, Brooks’s law on software project management states that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”.

This has more to do with communication, collaboration and slowness of getting up to speed when joining a software project.

Google has approximately 100,000 employees. Not nearly all of them are software engineers but, for the sake of this argument and to be generous, let's assume that they are.

Let's also be generous in assuming that only people in the US, and nowhere else, use it. That's about 330,000,000 users.

OTOH, the US army has approximately 1,300,000 service members and 800,000 reserves as well as approximately 330,000 civilians.

So (ignoring physical suitability) the potential labour power of the US army is approximately an order of magnitude greater than Google. Moreover, "labour intensive" usually means "people who go out to do physical things": the work scales with the number of hands you can bring to bear. Combat aside, military forces are often involved in work that requires lots of people to do things in "meatspace":

* Rescue operations * Medical assistance in impoverished areas * Food & humanitarian relief * Security at embassies and other locations * Policing in volatile areas * Natural disaster relief * Law enforcement * Piracy and drug interdiction

When the software engineers aren't busy thinking about software, they carry cups of tea between the kitchen and their desks (well I suppose they're probably thinking about programming then as well ;-)).

Finally, Google currently has a big operation, but like many startups, a pretty big product (the original search engine) was built by ~20 people. With those people they crawled almost every site on the web. If you wanted to go and read every document in every filing cabinet and index that then you'd need a labour intensive force bigger than the US army.

Here are the references I used:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces#Per...

https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/army-civilian-career...

https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/military-missions...

From what I understand, labor intensive means work that involves some sort of "physical" labor. How would you classify focus as a labor intensive work? An average individual can't maintain focus all the time. But an average individual can do physical work for long hours. The way our body works is different to way our mind works. Are you tired after hard physical labor? You just need some rest and good food. You can do physical labor even if your mind is not in the right place. Many workers in factories are so used to doing the same repetitive stuff (like packaging items in an assembly line or chopping vegetables for a high-paced restaurant) that they do it subconsciously. All they need to do is to get into a "zone".

But same can't be said about focus intensive work. You can do physical work without thinking. But can you code without thinking? There is nothing repetitive about coding. And if anything is repetitive we end up automating it.