I think the reason designing a building is faster is peoples' standards are lower.
Almost no one wants a building designed uniquely for their lifestyle. They don't even realize you could ask for such a thing. They just pick and choose from what they've already seen.
If that were true of software, it would be just as simple. But people keep asking for things no one has ever done before, exactly, and that leads to unpredictability. We keep seeing unique new software, so we are more likely to ask for the same.
The same is true for buildings when the architect is trying to do something new. Buildings could be just as interesting as software, but most people don't think to ask.
I think in the long term, buildings will be exactly as custom and complicated as software, and designing them will be just as difficult to estimate.
A lot of people hire architects precisely because they want a building designed for their lifestyle. No one goes to an architect and says "I'd like four walls, some rooms - I don't care what they do - and a roof. Can you do that?"
And the architect never says "Maybe. I wish I could be more specific, but it's just hard, you know?"
There's very little genuinely new in software. Even outside of the CRUD treadmill and corporate Java land, there isn't much of a leap between a Visual Basic application and an iPhone app. There are implementation and platform details, and lots of them. But the core concepts are recognisably similar.
The only real difference is that the tools keep changing - often for no good reason.
In architecture, stone is stone and concrete is concrete. In software, C++11 is not C++17, except for the bits that are, mostly, assuming you can find a toolchain that implements the differences properly.
Angular 1.0 is not Angular 2.0. Metal is not OpenGL, even though sometimes it smells like it. React is not jQuery is not a long list of other things, including Haskell, although you can bet someone somewhere is working on Category Theory as the definitive industry-changing conceptual model for MVC on web pages.
Most of the productivity costs associated with the constant churn are self-inflicted - the result of an industry more motivated by ADHD than by empirical analysis of which language and toolchain features make a real difference to getting shit done, and which are just unthinking tradition, random opinion, and noise.
That isn't the majority of people, though. Most of humanity lives in either apartments, cookie cutter developments, decades old homes they didn't build, or shanties. They don't get to choose, and customization is a luxury.
From what I've been told, it's very rare for an architect to find a client who will let them actually creatively design a space for utility. Clients are primarily interested in appearance, surfaces, size, and to some extent layout. Very few will pay an architect to prototype new concepts, custom design amenities, etc.
Not that that's a good idea for most people... it's better for resale if you make a cookie cutter house. Most codebases will never be sold. Almost every house will.
If you had to resell codebases they'd probably be a lot more standardized.
Almost no one wants a building designed uniquely for their lifestyle. They don't even realize you could ask for such a thing. They just pick and choose from what they've already seen.
If that were true of software, it would be just as simple. But people keep asking for things no one has ever done before, exactly, and that leads to unpredictability. We keep seeing unique new software, so we are more likely to ask for the same.
The same is true for buildings when the architect is trying to do something new. Buildings could be just as interesting as software, but most people don't think to ask.
I think in the long term, buildings will be exactly as custom and complicated as software, and designing them will be just as difficult to estimate.
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