You go up to a assembly worker and tell them their job requires minimal skills and that the "engineers" will have solved most of the problems in the manufactoring process and you'll probably get a thump :-)

Thanks. You are right to call me on this and you are right that i expressed myself poorly. To clarify (and save myself a thump :-) I shouldnt have said minimal skills. I probably should have said "minimal engineering skills". The point is that the folks working on the drawing board most likely have engineering degrees and the folks working the floor dont. If thats no longer true due to advances in the manufacturing process then forgive me for being a touch out of date. (I can imagine that robotics has probably eliminated much of the "unskilled labour" from the factory floor.)

I think engineering/factories and architecture/building are deeply flawed metaphors for software development. Any time I see one little warning bells start ringing in my head. They are usually based on "folk" ideas of how these processes work that have little resemblance to reality.

That would be a meditation id love to read. I still believe that there are things to be learned by such comparisons however. In this context however id like to emphasise that the process is not really what im comparing here. Im comparing the skill types and levels required of the different players in the game not really the process by which they work together.

I seem to recall that Knuth had a chunk more on the analysis of Shell sort in the second edition of his Sorting and Searching volume

Im pretty sure the edition im referring to was the second edition which does a fair amount of analysis, but also says that there are still unanswered questions about the algorithm.