zlacker

dang, software planning is harder than herding hundreds of entertainment people? Not what I would have expected! I always assumed the 'unknown unknowns' were much larger in real life enterprises than in software ones, and that'd make planning harder. A lot of advantages come from software being made out of formal systems.

>>frazbi+(OP)
Software has variability spanning multiple orders of magnitude. In entertainment, you might get one or two extras fewer or more than you needed, but you won't suddenly stand there with a hundred or thousand times more extras than you needed. Similarly, equipment will be hours or days away from where it's supposed to be, but you won't suddenly find out it got dumped on another planet.

Why does software have such extreme orders-of-magnitude variability? Anyone's guess. I like the perspective that software is made out of many pieces of little software, which are in turn made of even more smaller pieces of software. That fractal nature is a qualitative difference to people, which are not made of many tiny people. (As far as I know.)

>>frazbi+(OP)
Shooting a film is very much an act of discipline to a nearly militaristic degree if you are on a good set and the film isn't trying crazy new experimental things.

You can know really well how long a light person will take to do a thing, or how long the camera will take to find an angle. Knowing when your client will move their arse to send you the test_data.csv is very much unknowable.