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When you hire a contractor to redo your kitchen, do you ask how long it may take? When you order food online, do you expect to know when it will arrive? When

When you hire a contractor to redo your kitchen, do you ask how long it may take? When you order food online, do you expect to know when it will arrive? When you go to your mechanic for a repair, do you want to know when you may get your car back? When you go to a lawyer to verify a contract, do you need to know when they will be done? Why should building a software solution be any different?

yonixw 4y ago
> When you go to your mechanic for a repair, do you want to know when you may get your car back? I want! However, for my old 2000 car, repairs exceeded the original estimate 80% of the time, forcing me to change my day-to-day plan. This could be a hint: good/new things breaks less, giving you false confidence when estimating for old/bad stuff.
- jinmo 4y ago
  100% complexity beats assumptions
soulofmischief 4y ago
Each of the services you mentioned have much better constraints (distance to travel, pages to read, components to replace, etc) They also all suffer from estimation issues in practice. Luckily these constraints set a limit on how much a competent professional can underestimate the project. If you're asking someone to install or update some software they've installed before on a similar system, they should be able to give you a solid estimate. This has parallels with many of the services you mentioned. If you're asking them to research, develop and test entirely new components, which is the basis of software engineering (an engineer does more than install and update packages), you should be able to understand why this is different than delivering food.
- potamic 4y ago
  I think you're not appreciating the complexity involved in these. Except for delivery, other tasks do involve significant discovery, research and problem solving. Delivery on the other hand is also hard to estimate. Especially when you have multiple deliveries lined up, need to plan your route, find parking, register with building security, manage obscure addresses etc.
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    I said: > They also all suffer from estimation issues in practice. Luckily these constraints set a limit on how much a competent professional can underestimate the project. Where exactly did I claim these weren't complex services? All I said was that there are more constraints on these services than pure software dev. I went further and broke software dev down into different buckets of complexity to further pare down the argument and concede that some software dev should be constrained enough for accurate estimates. Dispensing with the straw man, what exactly is incorrect about my comment?
rrgok 4y ago
When you have health issues, for a seemingly difficult diagnose, and you call for an appointment to your doctor you ask how much time it will take to properly diagnose you? What is this your non sensical reasoning. Another example: does any movie director ask his actors how much time it will take to do a scene? Is that the job of an actor? Keep comparing apples to oranges and we will turn Software Engineer like any other menial job. We all know it there are a lot of unknowns, like health issues, that need to be evaluated before formulating any opinion about estimation. Stop with non sense about estimation.

yonixw 4y ago

> When you go to your mechanic for a repair, do you want to know when you may get your car back? I want! However, for my old 2000 car, repairs exceeded the original estimate 80% of the time, forcing me to change my day-to-day plan. This could be a hint: good/new things breaks less, giving you false confidence when estimating for old/bad stuff.

jinmo 4y ago
100% complexity beats assumptions

soulofmischief 4y ago

Each of the services you mentioned have much better constraints (distance to travel, pages to read, components to replace, etc) They also all suffer from estimation issues in practice. Luckily these constraints set a limit on how much a competent professional can underestimate the project. If you're asking someone to install or update some software they've installed before on a similar system, they should be able to give you a solid estimate. This has parallels with many of the services you mentioned. If you're asking them to research, develop and test entirely new components, which is the basis of software engineering (an engineer does more than install and update packages), you should be able to understand why this is different than delivering food.

potamic 4y ago
I think you're not appreciating the complexity involved in these. Except for delivery, other tasks do involve significant discovery, research and problem solving. Delivery on the other hand is also hard to estimate. Especially when you have multiple deliveries lined up, need to plan your route, find parking, register with building security, manage obscure addresses etc.
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  I said: > They also all suffer from estimation issues in practice. Luckily these constraints set a limit on how much a competent professional can underestimate the project. Where exactly did I claim these weren't complex services? All I said was that there are more constraints on these services than pure software dev. I went further and broke software dev down into different buckets of complexity to further pare down the argument and concede that some software dev should be constrained enough for accurate estimates. Dispensing with the straw man, what exactly is incorrect about my comment?

rrgok 4y ago

When you have health issues, for a seemingly difficult diagnose, and you call for an appointment to your doctor you ask how much time it will take to properly diagnose you? What is this your non sensical reasoning. Another example: does any movie director ask his actors how much time it will take to do a scene? Is that the job of an actor? Keep comparing apples to oranges and we will turn Software Engineer like any other menial job. We all know it there are a lot of unknowns, like health issues, that need to be evaluated before formulating any opinion about estimation. Stop with non sense about estimation.