And you are kind of illustrating my point. Building a house requires a lot of additional considerations. Like what kind of daylight you get in different rooms, that maybe the toilet shouldn’t be in direct connection to the dining area, how the kids’ rooms are located relativ to the living room. And you will probably have to redo 70% of the work with the kitchen if you don’t start with making sure that the plumbing is in place. (Someone who knows more about houses than I do can come up with much better examples. For this exact reason I’m consulting an architect before I start renovating my house, even though I’m perfectly competent to both remove and put up a drywall myself.)

Of course people learn with experience, and luckily redoing things in software development is cheap compared with when building houses. But that’s the only reason we get away with it.

My point is, we would build better and cheaper systems if we from the start acknowledge that we have to take into account completely different sets of considerations when we move up the scale. A shed isn’t just a big box, a house isn’t just a big shed, etc.

> Of course people learn with experience, and luckily redoing things in software development is cheap compared with when building houses. But that’s the only reason we get away with it.

Here in software, we've turned that into a positive thing and made a philosophy out of it. How do you know the toilet shouldn't be in the kitchen? Maybe the users like it? You know what, the data actually shows that in houses where the toilet is next to the kitchen stove, people spend (on average) more time in the living room, thus raising the core metric of happiness.