alt Hacker NewsInteresting you bring up (artistic) painting and bridge building.
I'm a house painter, and while the work is... It's just relentless work and staring all day.
It's the end results of making something just, better, with the simple acts of reputation and giving a shit about it.
Just wondering where house painter falls in your scale, I'd hunch.
Not the person you're replying to, but I'd agree with them, and think house painting would be basically identical to building a bridge.
The difference this comparison is capturing in my opinion is that of thinking up something new, compared to arranging things in a well known/already defined configuration. We know how to build bridges, we just have to do it (maybe including some calculations and site surveys, yes, but novel solutions are rightfully shunned). Similarly painting a house.
Developing software is practically definitionally creating a novel thing. If we wanted the same software over again we could literally copy and paste the existing executable (and we do that all the time, it's just not called developing software or enough work to be a job, since we have machines that are excellent at arranging the electrical charge in the pre-defined manner).
The actually-a-job* software equivalent of painting a house or building a bridge would be weaving a program into core rope memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory
* Not a job you can get anymore.