Yes! I still meet too many people who think what we are manufacturing software, while what we are doing is designing it. The manufacturing, that is, the building and deployment is already highly automated and very cheap.
This is the even more crucial difference and the reason for all the time estimation arguments.
If a manager can’t estimate a car production run schedule they’re a bad manager.
No manager can schedule — to the day — when fusion powered cars will be ready for shipping.
Yet, this is expected from people trying something entirely new in software.
“Integrate these two things that no human has put together before. Now that you’ve heard this single sentence, tell me: will it be ready Tuesday or Wednesday… a year from now?”
Imagine if compiling/deploying involved teams on the daily hand writing assembly/machine code from code base?