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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Construction is frequently slapdash. A friend's wife, who works as an engineer, commented that it often seemed like the construction workers were trying to screw everything up on purpose. As-built is frequently different from the original plans, and that's before you take into account all of the change requests that happen in construction, such as the change that caused the Kansas City Hyatt disaster (oops, a single change request doubled the load on a critical beam, causing it to exceed its design strength and fail in the middle of a major party and killing a hundred people).

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Construction has a standardized set of steps, which when followed will reliably produce a desired outcome. Programming has no such thing because it it can not, it is a fundamentally different discipline that is unlike any other that we call engineering. Negligence is not relevant.

Can you give an example of what you think one of these "standardized set of steps" in construction is?

My suspicion is that, if you start trying to get specific, you can actually find standardized steps at the same level of abstraction in programming. But since construction superficially looks like "stamp out multiple copies of the same thing" whereas programming is superficially "everything is its own special sauce," people try comparing them at different levels of abstraction.

Programming certainly can follow standardized design and implementation methodologies. I don't think there is anything fundamental about software engineering that prevents that. It doesn't usually happen because there's not enough agreement on all levels of what is the best methodology. Software engineering is young and still sees significant evolution. Principles of software design and engineering are largely agreed upon and applied, but not in a single, concrete and consistent standard because experts still disagree too much on the specifics of applying those principles, and on other controversial principles.

And of course there is often no regulations that would require and guarantee the application of such a standard, and no standardized QA by customers.

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