I’ve been thinking a lot about construction. Taking a very specific part of the process, building the staircase: you find a carpenter and they build the staircase to your measurements. Generally your contractor will find someone with decent experience that they think will do a good job for whatever price you’re willing to pay and then you get as staircase executed at whatever skill level happens to be available/at that price point.
Construction Physics had an interesting point the other day: mass production took off in America because the United States didn’t have skilled craftsmen the way Europe did. This is also borne out by my Instagram feed, currently: European tradesmen seem to be more artistic and skilled than the Americans in my feed (sorry fellow countrymen). My guess is that Europe’s aristocracy supported spending 5000 man-hours on a staircase in a way that the United States really couldn’t compete with. And now maybe a continuing culture that values these skills more? I don’t really know.
Regardless, I was thinking about how different this is than software engineering. There’s always someone’s first staircase they’ve ever built, which is not going to be as good as the thousandth (I hope!). However, if there’s a common component in software engineering, someone will have already built it and it will be the product of many engineers’ thousandth try at building user login, logging, whatever. Thus, a junior engineer can use these solid building blocks to create their own first-try-mess on top of. However, that mess will (hopefully!) have a solid foundation.
Open source and APIs are an incredible superpower software engineers have over the physical world. It’s like installing a staircase that was built by every master-craftsman over the last 500 years. And generally, the best tools are accessible to everyone: Fortune 500 companies can use Stripe/Twilio/Mercurial the same way an individual developer with a hobby project can. At least in the realm of software engineering, it is a golden age of equality.
Kristina Chodorow's Blog 
I’m years to late, but hey, I still want to challenge your “mass production took off in America because the United States didn’t have skilled craftsmen the way Europe did”- This a very US-centric way of view. And probably wrong.
The thing is: it that is the cause of mass-production, then why did it start (not in the USA), but in UK in the first place?
The industrial revolution started not in “America” — surely you meant USA and just confused un-tactful a whole continent with one of the 35 nations residing on the continent? No, the industrial revolution started in the UK. After the industrual revolution started in UK, it swapped to West Europe. And only *then* did it swap to the USA. That is said both by the german language Wikipedia and the english language Wikipedia.
An if a scarcity of skilled craftsmen would trigger mass-production … then this must have been the case all over Europe. Because mass-production was there first. And if they had a scarcity already, then “didn’t have skilled craftsmen the was Europe did” is a wrong thought.
In my opinion, the industrial revolution started because circumstances where right: an advanced enought level of power-giving machines (water, steam). No power, no mass production. Good enough precision machining methods: no precision, no continues flow of material due to losses and jams. And a high enough capital accumulation. No capital, no nothing. Don’t underestimate capital … this is what today makes “unicorn”s possible in the USA, but scarce in Europe. And in Europe back then capital was in abundance in UK since they conquered (and squeezed out) most of the world.
First mass-production was btw in the textile sector. A sector where there wasn’t really a high skilled craftsmen tradition. At least not as much as in building crafts. Never heard of weavers being in e.g. masonry circles 🙂
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_revolution
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