Software has several unique properties on both ends of its production process that make assertions of progress based on the software use case invalid.

Software is easy to define as “working”: just run it. But - useful software requires an absolute truck worth of code - 100k loc before you’re talking about a real product, or else dozens of iterations of a toy you make for yourself before it’s useful enough to quit toying with and just use for what you wanted it for.

Sure, the success of software is hard to anticipate and what “good” UX is is hard to pin down - that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking just making the code and having no lint errors. That shit is a slog but it’s a slog with a clear goal amenable to hill climbing.

Through that lens software is mostly pattern matching. It’s very rare that an activity in software construction is out of distribution because even if the core of the thing is novel it needs a massive blanket of UI and a tech stack and a production environment to run in and observability and and and and. You get it I hope.

Meanwhile most work out there is a mess of undocumented, un-codifiable detail with no objective criteria for success, only a very wide gradient of “job well done” to “what is this garbage go and fix it”.

We are solving the easy parts of software and soon all that’s left will be the parts that are just like other work. And then we engineers will also be doing mostly squishy subjective judgment stuff.