[T-zex]

Good point that software "industry" is not new, but I would argue that it is not an industry in a literal sense or at least it is a special industry. The special thing about software is that it is governed by the social aspects a lot.

And because of this, software has poor standardization practices.

Engineers in other sectors could prove their qualifications by showing certification diplomas, even education and years of experience would count. In software your qualification would be determined by some random dude and how well you fit his CS fetish of the month and that is it. Experience and education is only important while filtering CVs. If you designed a chip, an aircraft or skyscraper it is immediately impressive. If you built an FX trading platform it means almost nothing if you are a bit skeptical about pair programming.

It also applies the other way round. If project uses microservice architecture, what exactly does that mean? The result would be a wildly different if you compare such projects at FANG and some investment bank. How software is tested and released will be different in any team. And how that affects the poor developer will vary too. What is a good software? We can have an opinion, but there is no formal definition.

And because of this fragmentation and fluidity software as and industry is doing very different things. It will learn in some cases in others it will be incredibly ignorant.