[foepys]

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.

[jshen]

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.

[Lio]

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.

[jshen]

Those are bad managers. I always add a buffer on top of the buffer the engineers add themselves.

[jacquesm]

Bad managers are very common.