I’ll bite. It’s that way because software is much much much more complex than that. Building is a good example. One architect after university has enough know

I’ll bite. It’s that way because software is much much much more complex than that. Building is a good example. One architect after university has enough knowledge and mental capability to design a building that won’t topple: There are discrete number of parameters to work on and fallible elements are identified and understood very well. There’s manageable amount of degrees of freedom that architect is working with. It’s also not very common for physics to get an annual update. But when you go to funny-cat-pictures.com there are layers upon layers of complexity. There’s TCP, UDP, traffic encryption, indefinite number of hoops in routing, indefinite number of electronic devices with various quality, etc. Request comes happens from millions lines of code operating system and generation happens on a different millions lines of code of operating system with thousands of lines of codes of software code that interacts with databases, proxies, CDNs, load balancers and is templating, serving, translating, transpiling, compiling and serving while defending against adverse attacks, managing the cache, optimizing for network topology and requester rendering software. That changes every single day slightly. In 99% the worst case is - your picture won’t load. But when you get to the more serious software development (in a way that it’s critical domain, not that “serve cat pictures” isn’t serious job, mind you) all of it is very very visible. Every element is so unimaginably complex that it has literal tomes of knowledge written and published about it. Describing every element of transaction between end user and cat serving website would take hundreds of pages - and it would be different than other cat website. Most of the building, bridges etc. was made either by one person or small group of people working on it. Rarely software is written seldom, and many well known products have tens of thousands of inconceivable smart engineers and we still can make fun of their - not so rare - failures. So yeah. Systems suck, organizations suck, people suck. But they suck in relatively safe but also complex environment. For years software engineering was made fun of because it’s not real engineering. But when you look close enough the environment is orders of magnitude more difficult. Civil engineers might be offended but they can’t hold a candle to structures software is keeping straight. Software is a bridge built on a raft, floating on an ocean, which tries to get shot down by armed pirates and semi-controlled by a cost-saving manager trying to look good in annual progress report.