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> engineering where constraints are non-negotiable

except that's not really true. The big difference is that to negotiating the constraints when it comes to (physical) engineering, one of the biggest factors is money (and lots of it). "Well, we could double the span but for that you'll need to have parts A1, D5 and T3 built out of ..."

Software development isn't free, but it doesn't typically incur doubling of costs for tweaks to the feature list (and I do mean tweaks).




Maybe the real difference is that costs are hidden in software engineering, but more obvious in other disciplines?


I do a lot of data engineering work, and people are horrified to learn how much costs increase as you go from daily/hourly batch jobs to real time or near real time streaming. Seems like a tweak but it does sometimes incur massive cost increases.




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