Oh, it's plenty different. First off, software is not one thing. It encompasses more orders of magnitude of difference than almost any other industry. At one end you might have throwaway fart apps or single serving joke websites and at the other end you might have spacecraft avionics or industrial systems control or banking systems, and in the middle there is a multi-dimensional realm of tremendous breadth and volume. Additionally, software construction is by its nature creative. Creating a million or a billion or even a trillion copies of a piece of software is a more or less trivial and heavily automated task. Software isn't like making cars or houses or bridges. When you make a bridge there is a lot of work that goes into design but most of the work is in implementation. In software the implementation (the actual running of the software) is automated, all of the development work and all of the so-called "implementation" work is in truth just design work on finer and finer scales.

The combination of all of these factors makes software a different sort of beast than a lot of other work. Now, as I said, that doesn't mean that you can't still attack it with brute force and obtain results, but software is actually one of the realms where that is one of the least effective strategies.