zlacker

>>mattjh+(OP)
After owning a product, I've developed a lot of sympathy for the people outside of engineering who have to put up with us. Engineers love to push back on estimates, believing that "when it's done" is somehow acceptable for the rest of the business to function. In a functioning org, there are lot of professionals depending on correct estimation to do their job.

For us, an accurate delivery date on a 6 month project was mandatory. CX needed it so they could start onboarding high priority customers. Marketing needed it so they could plan advertising collateral and make promises at conventions. Product needed it to understand what the Q3 roadmap should contain. Sales needed it to close deals. I was fortunate to work in a business where I respected the heads of these departments, which believe it or not, should be the norm.

The challenge wasn't estimation - it's quite doable to break a large project down into a series of sprints (basically a sprint / waterfall hybrid). Delays usually came from unexpected sources, like reacting to a must have interruption or critical bugs. Those you cannot estimate for, but you can collaborate on a solution. Trim features, push date, bring in extra help, or crunch. Whatever the decision, making sure to work with the other departments as colaborators was always beneficial.

>>notjus+xw
I agree. Software engineering is basically the only industry that pretends this is professionally acceptable. Imagine if government staff asked when a bridge would be done or how much it would cost and the lead engineer just said "it's impossible to estimate accurately, so we wont. It's a big project tho".

Estimating in software is very hard, but that's not a good reason to give up on getting better at it

>>chrisf+kB
Government contractor's estimation is based on what number is politically acceptable, not how much the project would realistically take. 90% of public projects were overbudget [0].

But you're pretty spot on, as 'professionally acceptable' indeed means politically acceptable most of the time. Being honest and admitting one's limit is often unacceptable.

[0]: https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Why-do-large-proje...

>>rainco+FE
Yes, my claim is absolutely not that they're good at it haha.

Estimation is a real problem in a lot of industries, including ours, and I think that's probably common ground here -- I suppose my differing position is that I think the solution is to get better at it, not to refuse to do it.

I've been on projects where I've seen the budget explode and projects where I've seen the budget kept tight and on track. The latter is very hard and requires effort from ALL sides to work, but it's almost always achievable.

I actually empathize a little bit more with megaprojects because generally the larger the budget the harder it will be to keep on track in my experience. Most estimates we're asked to give in our day jobs are not even multi-million dollar estimates.

Also I'm using budget and estimate interchangeably but these are of course different things -- that's one of my nitpicks is that we often treat these as the same thing when we talk about estimating being hard. A lot of individual estimates can be very wrong without affecting the ultimate budget.