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I'd beg to differ. There is very little invention going on. Most software solutions tackle well-known problems, customized to a particular business need. Akin t

I'd beg to differ. There is very little invention going on. Most software solutions tackle well-known problems, customized to a particular business need. Akin to building a house, but with specific owner requirements (three-car garage, etc). It gets a little complicated partly because of the industry's penchant for reinventing its tools on a rolling basis. In the trades, technology remains largely unchanged over decades, and only truly useful new advances are integrated into workflows (for example, laser level vs plumb bob or spirit level). In software, new technological approaches are adopted on a continuous basis, and so a lot of effort is spent on learning how to solve old problems with new tools.

csours 6y ago
> "There is very little invention going on." If you said there is very little fundamental research going on, I would agree with you; but even putting together building blocks in a new way is invention. If you look at patents (arguably a unit of invention), most of them don't have fundamentally new building blocks, just existing blocks put together in new ways.
valenterry 6y ago
> Most software solutions tackle well-known problems, customized to a particular business need. Akin to building a house, but with specific owner requirements (three-car garage, etc.). Not really. The "building" part in software really is compiling and deploying your code. With CI/CD being set up, this takes a few minutes and requires almost no effort. So what's left is not "building" the house but "designing" it. Unfortunately, the comparison you give fits more for buying a software and installing/configuring it. Then yes, this should be rather well estimatible, given that you have done it before. But most software developers are not paid for that. They are paid to design a space station that has never existed before. Sure, they can use existing parts (libraries, frameworks) but it is still design in the sense that certain expectations are simply not possible. Or someone wants that the space station is connected to the other space station on another planet and we don't even know how the other space station looks like (it's built by another company). Who knows if it's even possible to connect them? And if not, the other space station might have to be adjusted to be connectable and this must be done by the other company. How long will that take? Who knows... By the way, don't think about a space station like the ISS here. Please think about a space station like the star wars death star. Because that's the complexity of most software where estimates are desired and important. And we are only talking about design, not building. The building part is easy - once we have designed it, we can actually copy it and have 100 of these exact space stations easily.

csours 6y ago

> "There is very little invention going on." If you said there is very little fundamental research going on, I would agree with you; but even putting together building blocks in a new way is invention. If you look at patents (arguably a unit of invention), most of them don't have fundamentally new building blocks, just existing blocks put together in new ways.

valenterry 6y ago

> Most software solutions tackle well-known problems, customized to a particular business need. Akin to building a house, but with specific owner requirements (three-car garage, etc.). Not really. The "building" part in software really is compiling and deploying your code. With CI/CD being set up, this takes a few minutes and requires almost no effort. So what's left is not "building" the house but "designing" it. Unfortunately, the comparison you give fits more for buying a software and installing/configuring it. Then yes, this should be rather well estimatible, given that you have done it before. But most software developers are not paid for that. They are paid to design a space station that has never existed before. Sure, they can use existing parts (libraries, frameworks) but it is still design in the sense that certain expectations are simply not possible. Or someone wants that the space station is connected to the other space station on another planet and we don't even know how the other space station looks like (it's built by another company). Who knows if it's even possible to connect them? And if not, the other space station might have to be adjusted to be connectable and this must be done by the other company. How long will that take? Who knows... By the way, don't think about a space station like the ISS here. Please think about a space station like the star wars death star. Because that's the complexity of most software where estimates are desired and important. And we are only talking about design, not building. The building part is easy - once we have designed it, we can actually copy it and have 100 of these exact space stations easily.