Except that if I'm hiring someone to build my house, if they tell me "well, I can guarantee you that we'll prioritize iteratively and get it done as fast as pos

Except that if I'm hiring someone to build my house, if they tell me "well, I can guarantee you that we'll prioritize iteratively and get it done as fast as possible" I'd tell them to piss off, I can't throw good money at that. You at least need a baseline estimate, and some data as to how often things go over or under. Apparently software engineers as a group seem to think "fuck you, it's done when we feel like it" is a valid answer? I disagree, and have always offered estimates, probabilities and contingencies when talking to product owners when I was a lead. I tracked data, and adjusted accordingly, and ended up giving estimates that were statistically sound. I don't necessarily expect individual contributors to do the same, but anyone that's a lead should be an adult and account for their team's actual productive capacity. This is absolutely expected of a building company, even if you don't expect a single dude with a hammer to be able to estimate how long the project will take.