> I would argue that the craftsmanship SWEs see in their work stems from a necessity to be novel in order to truly make something worth putting out into the market. ... There's no real merit to making clones, whereas in civil engineering (I would argue) this is the bread and butter. You can't copy and paste a bridge. There's a physicality to it that says "okay, make another bridge similar to this but now for that gap", so the challenge becomes making the necessary repetition more efficient, and it's "fine" if no one is going out of their way to be an "artisanal civil engineer".

This is a key insight that invalidates a lot of the manufacturing thought that infects software development. Manufacturing (in large part) is about making copies, better and cheaper. But with software, you can create perfect copies for free. A "software factory" makes no sense, there's a fundamental paradigm mismatch.