> Maybe the auto industry at the turn of the 20th century also spent decades re-learning the same lessons over and over, as the novelty of mass-producing comple

> Maybe the auto industry at the turn of the 20th century also spent decades re-learning the same lessons over and over, as the novelty of mass-producing complex systems continued to elude us. Hell, the new auto companies still don't get it right. I think you have a misconception about what manufacturing is like. Waterfall development is just as unrealistic in manufacturing as it is in software, the scales are just different. People create CAD models of the machines in a factory all the time but those are architectural diagrams - when it comes time to build, the people on the ground (the equivalent of the software engineers) have to figure out all of the details, often using no more than trial and error guided by a little intuition. Experienced individuals know more about the pitfalls and gotchas but they're still creating something new even if they're going off some grand design. Becoming a competitive manufacturer in something simple like ball point pen balls is a years long process of mastering the "craft," gathering real world data, and incrementally improving. Factors like a single critical employee's physical disability can decide the layouts of entire factories so there are no cookie cutter factories for them to build. The real world is a lot messier than software. Just like we spend most of our time chasing bugs and implementing features, they spend most of their time building or troubleshooting interfaces between machines and processes, optimizing, and so on.