[InclinedPlane]

Here is the deeply weird aspect of our industry: it's not monolithic, but so many people think it is even though they should know better.

I think this is largely because software is effectively invisible. Everything software does happens more or less without our ability to directly perceive it, it's just electrons shuffling around in silicon, and it's very hard to get a sense of the scale of anything because even at the high end of the scale where banks of computers are running, it's still just banks of computers humming along invisibly computing, there aren't tons of Earth being moved or ships crossing across oceans and so forth.

Anyway, our industry is one of the most diverse in the history of industry. It spans scales across factors of not just billions but trillions. And it ranges in complexity and seriousness across similar scales.

Imagine the "container" industry, which spans all the way from someone making wicker baskets in their spare time and selling them on ebay all the way up to perhaps the fuel tanks of orbital launch vehicles or the steel reinforced concrete containment vessel of a nuclear fission reactor. Or consider vehicles, which can be anything from a plastic tricycle all the way up to an aircraft carrier. Nobody would imagine that those industries are monolithic or that the way to run a tricycle factory is necessarily the same as the way you'd run a shipyard.

Yet here we are in 2012 and people who should know better still insist that running a "software company" is a singly story with a single set of best practices and a universal set of advice that applies equally well to every variant. In reality a "software company" is one of hundreds of different types of enormously different endeavors.

[ahoyhere]

You're right.

It probably doesn't help that the main "watering hole" for industry professionals is run by an investment firm. People tend to think of HN as simply "the place entrepreneurs go," but that too is a (facilely) monolithic thing! Like attracts like.