– You think carefully about a design for an upcoming project, using an operating system, development environment, and design tools you’re comfortable with.

God:

– You think carefully about a design for an upcoming project. You create your own universe as a blank slate.

Software Development:

– You lay down a framework on which to build the logic of your program. It has inputs and outputs and rules for each part of the program to follow. In the meantime, between coffee breaks and boring meetings, you write the initial documentation and put it up on a wiki page on the corporate intranet.

God:

– You create quantum physics and biology and indeed, life itself. You create the earth, a wide array of life forms, and human beings. You create a habitable living space for them to be fruitful and multiply, and you provide them a Book by which you tell your story and tell humans how to live their lives.

Software Development:

– Dissatisfied with the boredom of waiting for a project manager to get back to you, or for users to test your creation, you decide to tweak some of the variables on a test environment to see what’ll happen. You flip the signs of some dollar amounts to see what happens. You modify some variables of a running process to see what "falls out". You ask a user to push some buttons or input some values and track their activity to observe the result.

God:

– Bored with omnipotence and omniscience, you decide to tweak your creation, earth, with a few variables. You divert some asteroids from the rim of the solar system and send them crashing to earth at random intervals. You poke a guy named Steve Irwin square in the chest with a stingray’s barb, just to see what happens. You crack the sea floor, unleashing a massive earthquake and a tsunami which floods thousands of miles of coastline. You carefully observe the impact of the changes you make, as well as the changes that spontaneously occur as a result of your system’s own internal energies, imbued with power by you.

Software Development:

– The day for the initial release has come. Customers line up to your e-commerce site to purchase and download the first version of your product. You offer incentives including a chance to win a $1,000 Amazon Gift Card and even a brand new Toyota Yaris for purchasing your product. You bundle with the product the initial documentation, saved as a huge HTML document, directly off the wiki page. You had a few (cute) interns give it a once-over, and are confident it’s all the users need to make use of the software.

God:

– The end of days for earth have come. You haven’t updated your Book in ages, although at one point you played a trick on a fellow you created who was given the name Brigham Young and tweaked his neurons with a substance you designed, which activated after he had a meal of some unusual, but tasty, mushrooms, after which he decided to write his own quaint treatise on your will and words, all fabricated but nonetheless pretty flattering. You begin the steps towards ending the universe.

Software Development:

– It’s been a year since your initial release. Bug reports arrive daily, but you don’t care, you’ve banked enough coin with corporate support contracts and subscriptions to enable you to take a 6-month sabbatical in China. You grin to yourself smugly and think, "They’re just users, they’re a dime a dozen!"

God:

The star the earth was circling has grown into a red giant and enveloped the earth, destroying all life, except for John McCain and Ann Coulter. As they gasp their last, they ask you why they’ve been forsaken and all that jazz. You roll your eyes and let the system run its course. The bones of billions of your creatures on earth have long since been pulverized or fossilized. You grin to yourself smugly and think, "They were just humans, they’re a shekel a dozen!"