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Comment by jakubmazanec | Hacker News Reader

I'm not arguing against the core arguments of the article (I agree with most of the points), but on the other hand, software development is (at least currently) an essentially iterative process - one that differs greatly from other production processes (e.g. buildings, cars). We all know how difficult it is to estimate how much development time something takes. Planning is hard and outcomes have therefore greater variability.

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I generally agree with you, but if you look deeper, cars, buildings, and the underlying know-how didn’t appear in a day either.

Those were also iterative processes: first tires and mud houses, then horse carriages and brick houses, and eventually cars and buildings.

In that sense, it’s not fundamentally different from engineering today. Working on core engineering functionality of a company is essentially the same kind of process.

The difference lies in whether you’re working on core functionality, or on some iterative experiment that nobody knows will succeed.

When it comes to cost rebuilding, we can't compare the software engineering with other industries(like cards or buildings). I think this makes it much more iterative compared to them. Living in North America, if feel like 99% of aparatments and houses can be grouped into 5-10 floor plans. I think thats because when you are designing a new building or house you really can't do much risk. You do what has already worked. Software also have trends, but they change so often. You also can't do A/B testing or targeting or measure every single interaction potential customer has with your product. The nature of building "Software" really brings so many options to the table which increases the number of iterations by order of magnitude.

I'm talking about how a single product is produced, not about its evolution through centuries. Anyway, the point wasn't to compare specific details, it's just an analogy.

The other major factor is that increasing dev work for "side bets" doesn't require large Capex investments which typically other industries do (building a new car as a moonshot project? you have to spin up a whole new factory). all you need is some office space and not even that if you're hiring remote

Your aren't building a car when you are writing software, you are building a car factory.

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