Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

Fun fact.. it doesn’t!

Some of the most widely used software has been created in a few weeks or days.

This is an interesting analogy. However, I would argue that Law is less constrained by the laws of nature.

If a program is broken, even the best programmer in the world may not be able to fix it if they can't diagnose the underlying problem. Whereas in law; there is no such problem. If a law is found to be bad, you change it. Most reasonably competent lawyers could come up with a solution. Not to say that creativity and intelligence isn't required, the constraints are just different. (You do hit the laws of nature at some point, but I believe there are guardrails in law that prevent this from happening; e.g. no judge will sentence a person to run a million miles even if some combination of inane laws may require that as punishment).

It's because most software developers add negative value. Most not them aren't investing in learning at all and are just playing around and understanding things on the surface level. I'm fairly certain it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer.

I've been getting into elixir and was very sad to realise that a lot of the best practices have been enshrined into the erlang otp library for 20 years and we've forgotten about it.

Think how many engineers you know that can reason well about db indexes or could implement something like redis given enough time.

On the one hand it's fairly depressing, on the other hand it makes sense from the incentive structure - business people treat them like "nerds" they're not on the same career path as someone in management, PMs come from weird professions that have nothing to do with software and are focussing on weird scrum processes and jira tickets...

At least that has been my experience. I've seen massive amounts of wasted resources that has made me a bit jaded

"it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer"

you are wrong in many levels.... accounting is a field that moves slowly and it is highly regulated

Software is still in the wild wild west phase, and it catches and loses trends all the time. We are currently using languages and platforms that didn't exist at all 10-12 years ago, yet, in 10 years whatever you are doing now, might be completely obsolete and you have to retrain-retool.

One aspect that is not mentioned is that we build software on top of an ever-increasing number of first-to-market, low-quality, building blocks. And by low-quality I mean "worse is better"/MVP/"everyone makes mistakes"/"leaky abstractions"/etc -- pick your favorite. As a result, we spend more and more time dealing with someone else's mistakes rather than making forward progress.