This is a great analogy.

There’s some related thoughts on safety practices that would be readily apparent to someone on a job site that apply to software as well. In my personal experience, people who don’t take pride in their work are the same ones that end up creating unsafe situations. The software parallels are easy to imagine.

> It's basically like a construction site - plenty of low rent projects are done in a totally disorganized "get 'er done" way. You won't see that as much for a high value construction site with top tier vendors and workers who value their craft.

The Salesforce tower in San Francisco begs to differ: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a29329189/salesforc...

> for a high value construction site with top tier vendors and workers who value their craft.

Is it really that, or are there just so many parties involved, that a heavy bureaucracy/coordination layer is required to keep the project from collapsing on itself, and this happens to manifest as everything looking neatly organized and structured?

This and construction is governed heavily by codes (in the US, at least). This constrains how much freedom builders have to design any-which-way they want.

But to the OPs point, there is a stark difference in the quality of work between tradespeople who respect their craft and those who look at it as merely a means to a paycheck.