I disagree with most of the points you made (mainly because I think the analogy is very weak). But I'm waiting for your next part before commenting more. For a

I disagree with most of the points you made (mainly because I think the analogy is very weak). But I'm waiting for your next part before commenting more. For a few short notes: - Software, nowadays, are both services and products. And we are already providing the services to a much larger numbers of customers than developers. - It could be said that "build" would be a good description too. But "build" as in "we build a company", rather than "we build a wall". There are big multinational corps as well as mom & pop shop, and there are big distributed programs as well as simple CRUD apps. We'd have the industrial revolution in software when we have one in starting a business (which some may argue is happening too, actually). - And finally, "engineer" would be an apt description too, we're merely engineering the program, with all the declarative programming and what not :-). The compilers & co are our factories. Luckily in our case, no sweatshop is involved in manufacturing.