I'm so tired of these rants. They're always very unoriginal and cover the same points of waaaah software is slow, software is bloated. And they never offer solutions or analysis beyond "(almost) everything sucks".
Y'know why software sucks? People. People are hard to manage, hard to incentivize, hard to compensate. Focusing on the slow loading web page is neglecting the economic incentives to bloat the bundle with trackers, to ignore perf work in favor of features, to not compensate open source developers.
The point about engineers in other domains doing it better, well I'm not exactly convinced about that (look at the bloated cost of building in America). But taken as true, they're doing better because there are economic, legal, and social incentives to do better. Not because they're just better at engineering.
I think there's also some big conceptual distinctions between making software and the other engineering practices it gets compared to in these articles.
If you're making a building or a bridge, it may have some aesthetic or small functional qualities that make it unique, but 99% of the job is to make it with the same success criteria as every other building or bridge. The building needs to stand up, hold people, have X amount of floors, and not fall over. A bridge has to get people/vehicles over it and not crumble.
Pretty much every piece of software is expected to do something new and innovative. It starts off with an abstract idea and details are filling in as you go. You stumble into some roadblock because of some design conflict that wasn't obvious until you were implementing. If the software is being made at the request of a client or your company, they probably gave a bunch of success criteria that has a bunch of inherently contradictory ideas that they'll need to compromise on because users don't actually know what they want until they're using it. You finish off the first version, they identify all the things that aren't working, and now there's new success criteria you need to implement built off a foundation that wasn't prepared for it. No architect ever finished erecting a skyscraper only to be told it needs a major change that will involve reworking all the plumbing.
That's the inherent difference. Software is a game of constantly trying to chase a moving target, and most of it is being built on a stack that is trying to chase moving targets at every level.
Y'know why software sucks? People. People are hard to manage, hard to incentivize, hard to compensate. Focusing on the slow loading web page is neglecting the economic incentives to bloat the bundle with trackers, to ignore perf work in favor of features, to not compensate open source developers.
The point about engineers in other domains doing it better, well I'm not exactly convinced about that (look at the bloated cost of building in America). But taken as true, they're doing better because there are economic, legal, and social incentives to do better. Not because they're just better at engineering.