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Comment by vidanay | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, building a cabin isn't a fundamentally complicated project. Think. Measure. Measure. Cut. Nail. Repeat.

I've seen the rage they describe first hand. It renders you unable to think clearly. Also, making a mistake is a lot easier to manage when your own finances aren't on the line.

It’s quite clear to me they never held a job where their fuck ups actually imply their own responsibility for their actions.

Software isn’t fundamentally complicated. Think. Type. Repeat.

You're not wrong.

Kinda like building a web app. Think, estimate, write, compile, deploy, repeat.

On a serious note, there's so many similarities between building a house and a web app.

Without a proper plan and a blueprint, preferably by an architect and not the contractor - forget about it. Client never knows what they want. Small changes (KILL ME NOW) can take huge amount of time and impact things that don't seem connected, which the client never understands. The last 10% is rarely completed or done badly. It always takes much longer than expected. Everyone's excited in the beginning and considers euthanasia toward the end.

It's hilarious really.

The similarities to web applications are not many. If you fuck up, you can erase the lines of code and replace it with the new ones. If you fuck up the foundation of your house, you've now potentially wasted many man-hours and whatever resources you used on it, and will probably need to spend just as many to fix it.

If the "core" of your software needs to be rewritten half way through the project then that's a disaster and you've also wasted many man-hours on it.

Maybe my crap's not loosely coupled enough.

Building a cabin is more like programming a game of tic-tac-toe. They weren't trying to build the Burj Khalifa on an as-you-go basis.

Put that way, literally nothing is "fundamentally complicated". Either you've never built a cabin and don't know what you're talking about, or you're an expert carpenter and have forgotten what it was like to be a beginner.

I think you missed "Know" or "Have experience" as one of the steps... Building can be pretty unintuitive if you haven't done it before.

No no it's all very easy, as is brain surgery: Think. Cut. Repeat. Nothing to it. Fine motor skills are irrelevant. Eyesight and depth perception play no role. Knowledge of the field can be learned immediately, in fact all you need to know is right in my three step directions!

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