This is not true for most. Imagine going to a contractor to get a house built and they tell you that they can’t tell you what it will cost or when it will be done.
You have obviously never built a house in the U.S., otherwise you would never make such a statement.
As almost everyone knows, construction delays and cost overruns are the norm, not the outlyer. Construction projects here very often suffer dearly from the "2 more weeks and/or a couple more thousand dollars" overrun issues.
In fact, I'm sure at least several people who have been trapped in a home renovation nightmare LOLed deeply after reading your post.
I’ve worked on the building of major resorts that many people in this thread have probably been to. I’ve seen this done well before, and I’m happy to compare credentials if that’s the route you want to go. Then we can see who LOLs.
A major resort is a project that has very large contractors involved and where a part of the upside for the contractor is how well they can manage the buffer they built into the quote for the project. The smaller that buffer the bigger the chance they will win the bid but also the bigger the chance that they will end up losing money on the deal.
Houses (not housing tracts) tend to be built by much smaller contractors who are in absolutely no position to absorb any setback without going bankrupt, you can't apply the rules for 'big business' to small time operators and expect the exact same outcome.
Constructing resorts also has all kinds of economies of scale that building individual houses does not.
That’s fair, I may have picked a poor example, but I maintain a business needs to be able to have a reasonable estimate of the cost of doing something, and often needs the ability to hit a target date.
This is very doable in software, and I’ve seen it done for decades from all levels of the org chart.
I don't know about the US but in Germany this is already the case. You get a rough estimate but nothing is set in stone.
Overshooting deadlines and increasing costs due to materials not being available or them suddenly costing twice as much is normal.
Also coordination between all the various contractors is always getting messed up because the person putting up the scaffolding didn't show up, so the plumber cannot work and cannot come back for 3 weeks, which messes up the plan for the drywall, which gets pushed back, and so on.
But they give you an estimate for cost and time, and are reasonably close to it. I.e. it doesn’t cost 3x the estimate!
They could probably do it more accurately but it would lose them bids, so they knowingly low-ball it. You shouldn’t have that problem inside a company doing software.
Of course you have that problem inside s company building software.
Engineers low ball partly because they don’t know what’s involved in a new piece of work. Like walking between two points on a map; they don’t know what they’ll run into on the ground.
Managers and stake holders then bully the engineers into lowering the estimates because even that’s not quick enough. Worse, they scale the team without discussion without realising that will make the project harder to deliver.
That's pretty much every contractor that I've ever worked with. It's all based on estimates with set minimums, buffers in time and money to deal with the weather and other outside influences and even provisions to deal with the changes in price for raw materials.
The only way you are going to get a hard quote is if you buy a prefab or a house that the contractor has already put up multiple times (and even then there will be some room for adjustment). Oh, and foundations are a completely different story.
Yes, I think we are saying the same thing. You use buffers and other means of flexibility to hit a target launch, and it works most of the time but not all the time.
Makes sense only if you assume building software is like building a house. Imagine getting an author to tell you when the novel they are writing will be finished?
Or this: imagine seeking an estimate on when a house will be built, trimmed, painted, furnished, decorated, and filled with every item needed practically and for comfort by the homeowner.
It’s a living process that requires continuous reassessment of priorities and scope, and in fact never finishes when you consider the life of the home.
So you think it’s reasonable to have no idea what it will cost, or when it will be done, when building software? You think it’s possible to run a successful business that way?
> So you think it’s reasonable to have no idea what it will cost, or when it will be done, when building software? You think it’s possible to run a successful business that way?
It absolutely is; look at some of the biggest and most successful software companies in the world. No-one has any idea what facebook will cost or when it will be done (Zuckerberg has said that he was off by at least 5 orders of magnitude IIRC). No-one has any idea what google will cost or when it will be done. No-one has any idea what amazon will cost or when it will be done. No-one has any idea what netflix will cost or when it will be done.
Google and Facebook are companies. They aren’t features. I know a lot of people at both companies, and they absolutely gave dates and estimation for many things.
I make a point of stopping project managers when they use the analogy of building a house to push back on estimates. What was the contractor doing before the current job? Building a house. What will they do after this job? Build a house.
By contrast, software development is doing stuff that hasn't been done before. You may be lucky, and have done something similar. If it's really been done before, you would ideally be using something off the shelf.
For me, a project manager who uses this analogy has no place running a software project.
Construction companies can do all sorts of projects, and still usually have to meet a deadline. Do you think every bridge or skyscraper is the same, just because they are all bridges and skyscrapers? And do you think mechanical engineers are also not estimating delivery dates just because they usually create new stuff? Because that's not the case.
Also, tons of software dev isn't actually about pushing boundaries or doing something that hasn't been done before. In fact, I'd say most development is about implementing known solutions but in a customized way. Just like every other engineering field.
The analogy was house building. Generally a house builder will not be building skyscrapers next month.
And the project managers who use the analogy don’t make the comparison with significant and novel civil engineering projects. They make the comparison with having their kitchen extended.
A few months ago i worked at a company which estimated 2 months, after 1 year and a half it’s still not done, i quit a couple of weeks ago
But the client, a really bigcopany, it’s angry but stillwaiting, lying to tjeir upper managent to get a few bonuses
Imagine wanting a two floor house with a closed kitchen and once all the wall built you request your contractor to have a single floor one with the garage underground now and an open kitchen with island.
With a loose enough contract that they can ask whatever for free.
As almost everyone knows, construction delays and cost overruns are the norm, not the outlyer. Construction projects here very often suffer dearly from the "2 more weeks and/or a couple more thousand dollars" overrun issues.
In fact, I'm sure at least several people who have been trapped in a home renovation nightmare LOLed deeply after reading your post.