If builders built the way programmers program, the first woodpecker would destroy civilisation.
The analogy points at a difference in accumulated standards rather than in the people. Building acquired load factors, inspection and liability across centuries of visible collapses; software has had decades and its failures are mostly invisible. The comparison is unfair in its own terms and it keeps being made because the asymmetry it names is real.
In practice
- A bridge is signed off by an engineer who is personally liable; a payroll system ships with a known defect list and a release note.
- A firm that would never accept one failure in a thousand structural beams accepts a login that fails for one user in a hundred, and files it as an edge case.
- Standing
- Often quoted simply as Weinberg's Law. Compare the entries on technical debt and the Swiss cheese model.
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- The programmers' folklore, and technology's place in society