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by cubano 1208 days ago
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.
2 comments
midoridensha 1207 days ago
>In fact, I'm sure at least several people who have been trapped in a home renovation nightmare LOLed deeply after reading your post.

These stories are SO common (and I've seen it in my own family too) that I truly question the sanity of anyone who takes on a home renovation project.

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jshen 1207 days ago
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.
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jacquesm 1207 days ago
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.

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jshen 1207 days ago
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.

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