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I think building software is more like building a whole city for millions of people in one go. The bridge has a very simple goal, to cross from one place to another. Also you would need to speed up time a lot for it to be comparable. Imagine if technological change was so fast that by the time you finished building the bridge there were flying cars everywhere.

Blueprints are not that important when you need to build something that needs to adapt. Take for example olimpic stadiums that no one uses, they might have good blueprints and all the regulations but who cares now they are still useless. On the other hand take the exampole of haussman buildings in paris they are still being used and proved very adaptable.

I guess it might have something to do with nassim taleb's concept of antifragility. Software is very rapidly proved to be fragile because it operates in a context where there are a lot of black swans. On the contrary bridges operate on another time scale wher it might not be so obvious how fragile they are but given the correct scale you would have bridge builders facing the same problems as software developers.

[edit] Also you need to take into account the crazy fact that you build software based on some facts but the software you build changes those facts, so now you need to change the software that will change the facts so on and so forth.

Yes i know its not just you i was thinking more of the dilemmas of the developing software sector in Paris, congratulations by the way. What i see is that engineers are seriously underpaid in Paris at least. This is also the fault of french engineers, i think a lot of them think of money as dirty and are afraid to negotiate what their work is worth. And eventually that will generate a serious shortage of talented workforce for french companies. That situation could lead to the french tech sector not being able to be competitive with some other European countries like Germany.

[edit] I'm not even talking about silicon valley salaries. I compare the salaries to what skilled workforce in France earns which is minimum 4000 after tax per month, that is the lowest salary for highly prepared professionals where there is a lot of demand for workers. You have a lot of software devs working for half of that in France. For me when the reality of the workforce shortage hits the companies its going to be too late.

On a side note looking at the job offers on the company site i can't understand why people that want to build a solid company would offer such a low salary. They offer 40k-55k for a senior engineer, 40k is like 2600 euros a month.

I think the french tech sector is shooting itself on the foot by not adapting salaries faster to the job market. Even floor managers in retail stores make more money in Paris. They will lose a lot of talented people to other countries like this. Plus salaries are rising anyways so yo hire some people at those salaries and then when you want to hire more people you need to pay the new ones a lot more so that generates tensions inside the teams because new hires are better payed.

And its a cycle, because software engineers in France are considered not worthy of big salaries, so they pay peanuts. Talented engineers just move to other countries and whats worse the number of new graduate engineers stagnates compared to the demand because people don't regard this profession as something desirable. in 5 to 10 years when demand for labor increases France wont be prepared.

Very short sighted thinking from ceos in france.