[sushiwarrior]

You also work in a place where it is not acceptable to be performing a task for the first time, as they are of importance enough to require prior experience, and hence usually do not evolve quickly. Software is constantly changing and software developers are much more likely to completely overhaul a product than a physical design. They will also deal with changing dependencies due to updates and, in things like Javascript land, what way the wind happened to blow that day. Software developers are constantly on adapting and uneven ground for most products which strive to keep very up to date.

At places where true software engineering work is required, like mission critical systems, the type of planning that you may be used to will be more common. However even for large companies like Oracle, things like the healthcare site can go wrong [1]. That is just the nature of having to constantly adapt. If things just stayed stagnant, we could get the same level of safety and generations of consistent improvement that things like cars have received, which does happen with maybe Unix or C perhaps. But that does not change the fact that most day-to-day software development is all about hiring someone who knows slightly better than you, but, more importantly, knows how to learn how to get many reasonably new things done which involve parts of what he knows. We don't have the luxury of using safety or danger as a warning, usually.

[1]: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/12/03/cover-ore...

[jacques_chester]

Given that Pivotal wrote and then donated ownership of an entire containerised cloud platform, built from scratch, before any of Mesos, Kubernetes or Docker existed, I feel like we've done some fairly heavy original engineering.

We estimate every story. Sometimes hilariously wrong (Diego was a classic example of a research-heavy project blasting past the initial gut-check estimates and improving in accuracy as it matured).

But a lot of the time well enough to allow for useful business decisions to be made by ourselves and other members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

The reason that I keep saying that useful estimation is possible is because I do it every single week. Hundreds of my peers in Pivotal and partner companies do it every single week. Hundreds of client developers do it every single week.

But I hear that it's impossible. So I guess I'll change my résumé to read "Wizard".

[selimthegrim]

Oracle set that up to fail when they wrote the contract with payment not tied to milestones and parachuted in liberal arts majors with no technical or healthcare background as project managers.