Nearly half a century after The Mythical Man Month, we still don't know how to manage software development except by throwing money at it. And the scale of software is limitless in the amount of code, complexity, and technical debt that can be added. Management can't guess which parts of software are adding value, rather than collecting rent. The principal-agent problem looms large.

In contrast, the scale, and thus the complexity and cost, of embedded tends to be limited by physical constraints.