Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by re-thc 966 days ago
> The same way an experienced bricklayer, or house painter, can give you a pretty good estimate. Ask them to also install a kitchen or repair a roof and if it's one of their first jobs...You can throw away the estimates...

There are way more moving parts and variables in the software world.

The same change that took 5 minutes last time could now take 5 days because someone changed the schema or anything else. Where's the integration test? That part of it got excluded some weeks ago. Why didn't anyone notice? It's not impacting customers...

Software is complex yet a lot of modern organizations turn a blind eye to lots of it if it doesn't "impact the business".