The difference is you're hiring most other trades-people to do a generally fairly routine bit of work and then be done. A lot of programming is about doing unro

The difference is you're hiring most other trades-people to do a generally fairly routine bit of work and then be done. A lot of programming is about doing unroutine work that has no clearly defined end-state. I've been on teams where estimation is easy - you've got years of roughly the same set of devs doing fairly similar feature/bug work on the same code base to look back on and give an educated guess on sizing. Right now I'm on a team that's mostly doing integrations with third-party systems where our skill levels on the team vary between 20 years and 6 months of experience in the field, let alone this team.