[gregoriol]

You are referring to non-engineering managers, which will also happen in other industries, this depends more on the size of the company I'd say.

Also, if you are really the only one to understand (if you are the only tech in a startup for example), then part of your job is actually to explain.

Problems hit by developers are imho the same kinds that you describe with rocks: something unexpected has happened, we didn't/couldn't see it coming because of this and this, we need to do/change this and this, ... or maybe the risk was already considered in the estimate.

One big difference I was thinking about is that in the software industry nobody dies if something goes wrong. In building a tunnel, or shipping or many other industries, if you don't consider the risks well enough and ahead, someone might die.

[ianwalter]

They're not even necessarily referring to non-engineering managers. It's often difficult to explain to engineering managers or other engineers why something won't work or requires more work/research if they themselves have not done the work. The engineering manager isn't even necessarily that familiar with the technologies being used or experienced in the specific problem being solved.

When digging a tunnel, there is a finite number of kinds of rock that you can hit. It's well within the realm of possibility that an experienced engineer is familiar with any of the rock they will encounter, even if they didn't expect to hit them when digging. This is generally not the case with software. Even as an experienced engineer you continually hit issues that you've never encountered before and don't know how to solve without spending a significant amount of time doing research or trying out different solutions.

The upper bounds of complexity are higher in software than construction. It's not narcissism, it's just the nature of that kind of work.

[agentultra]

> The upper bounds of complexity are higher in software than construction. It's not narcissism, it's just the nature of that kind of work.

It's a wonder that it works so well in fact.

I think software is probably the most complex and difficult engineering humans undertake. If you think of all the ways that a program can crash, compute incorrect results, and generally go wrong -- it's amazing that it even works at all let alone that in practice it works so well.

And we don't even have a widely accepted body of knowledge, capital-P professional obligations, liability, etc. We constantly hire people with no formal training, give them no formal training, and make no expectations of their expertise. We hire them for lots of money and put them in front of important projects and we promote them up. It's almost unreal.

Talk to a civil engineer or a doctor about what it took them to enter their profession and the amount of work they have to put in to maintain their license. And they get paid less than most software engineers.

And yet it's still somewhat unbelievable. Digging tunnels requires a lot of expertise and domain knowledge but as others have mentioned: there are only so many rocks out there to encounter. Once you have a thorough survey there are scant few unexpected problems you might run into.

But computing? Well... unless there's a battle-tested library that solves the exact problem you have then you're basically solving the problem from scratch. And one mistake is all it takes. You can't just add an extra I-beam or use a stronger steel... there's no fudge-factor in discrete systems. The whole enterprise of computing is managing complexity -- we have whole fields dedicated to the study of complexity with plenty of unsolved problems!

I believe it is just the nature of the work and why it remains so infuriatingly difficult to predict outcomes.

My pet response when someone asks why estimating software is hard: you've lost your keys in your house. give me an estimate on how long you think it will take to find them. I know you're going to think that if the keys are in the usual place it will take less than a minute. But if they're not... If you check all the places you might've been in the last few hours, maybe 5 minutes. But if they're not there then you'll have to think about how to search your whole house which could take hours. And what if you still don't find them?

And on and on.

[chli]

Nobody will die if your webpage doesn't render but software is used in safety critical environments too.

[XorNot]

Safety critical environments though are just fundamentally different when software is developed. Like a reality of them is that the assumption is a development time of years if the needed platform doesn't exist, and if it does then the changes need to be trivial to the point of being done by the time you propose doing them since all your time will be spent analyzing and studying the impacts.

[gregoriol]

I meant those who make the project don't die in software