[pieno]

Reminds me of this movie illustration the complexity and human collaboration required to produce a pencil: https://youtu.be/IYO3tOqDISE (6:33 in total; it’s a bit “dreamy” sometimes but still worth a watch, you can skip the first minute).

Basically entire human civilization is based on collaboration, learning from and relying on each other (among other things). The process kickstarted with developments in agriculture, freeing up Human Resources to work on other things. We’ve been perfecting this for a few thousand years, of which we’ve been automating things using software for only 50 years (being generous here). Give it some time - with the current rate of development we may not need another thousand years to improve software development to near perfection as well ;-)

(Or more pessimistically: there’s still a lot of hunger in this world so even after a few thousand years we’ve not even perfected the most basic of human needs - doesn’t bode well for something as fancy as the typical glorified beans counter that is most enterprise software...)

Disclaimer: This video is typically used as a pro free markets argument to illustrate the level of cooperation required to produce even the simplest things, arguing that such collaboration is only possible by free actors in a free market - that’s not the point here but still interesting tangent to think about in this context.

[zokier]

Sure, supply chains exist everywhere (and managing them is a field of its own..), but usually they are more explicit at least on each "link" of the chain. Can you imagine producing pencil in full anarchy where people just do random stuff and somehow you have to fish out the things you need and hope they keep the flows going without any explicit agreements or contracts? Where you get wood from logger because he happens to like logging that much, or he had some leftovers after doing a gig for someone else? That imaginary world resembles more the current state of software.