What I mean is if you have a parcel of the Earth and you want to make a road through it you open a specially designed software (Autodesk Civil3D) and you can basically do it. Whether it's a dirt road or a 6 lane highway (or a tunnel or a bridge). Finite element analysis is magic after all :)
Sure, that tunnel might not survive, but the way to fix it is pretty clear. More structural support and then protecting the structures from the environment (corrosion, soil erosion from water and wind, underwater currents, etc), and then due to the inherent nature of brick and mortar stuff is they are hard to change after the fact (it's hard to change a skyscraper to have a stronger core to resist more wind loads for example) , so it basically forces the customer to commit to some requirements (eg. how many rooms do you need, how much traffic the bridge/tunnel has to carry, how big floods the dam has to be able to withstand) and this has downstream effects of drastically pruning the search space. And then cost estimation is usually again simpler, because we have measurements (this long, this amount of mass, we need this amount of stainless steel of this grade, this amount of concrete of this type, in this region by this availability, etc...)
> frame a window for a house
sure, but there are about ten options, and you can go through them pick the one you like and get a craftsmen/contractor
Most IT/software problems reduce to very straightforward ones once we have the same degree of constraintedness, but mostly we don't.
Sure, that tunnel might not survive, but the way to fix it is pretty clear. More structural support and then protecting the structures from the environment (corrosion, soil erosion from water and wind, underwater currents, etc), and then due to the inherent nature of brick and mortar stuff is they are hard to change after the fact (it's hard to change a skyscraper to have a stronger core to resist more wind loads for example) , so it basically forces the customer to commit to some requirements (eg. how many rooms do you need, how much traffic the bridge/tunnel has to carry, how big floods the dam has to be able to withstand) and this has downstream effects of drastically pruning the search space. And then cost estimation is usually again simpler, because we have measurements (this long, this amount of mass, we need this amount of stainless steel of this grade, this amount of concrete of this type, in this region by this availability, etc...)
> frame a window for a house
sure, but there are about ten options, and you can go through them pick the one you like and get a craftsmen/contractor
Most IT/software problems reduce to very straightforward ones once we have the same degree of constraintedness, but mostly we don't.