zlacker

You have to try to understand that building software is not like baking a cake in a custom shape. Which if you have seen those shows it requires a certain amount of ingenuity to create a cake shaped like a fountain. Or whatever.

But fundamentally software development has 1000 to 1000000 more moving pieces than a cake, generally a research project, like building a new type of aircraft engine. Except, imagine it was a really new type of engine that was being built based on an alien landing. But they could not get into the engine to see how it worked because it was an unknown alloy. So they were trying to invent a new type of anti-gravity drive based on a few clues.

I mean we are not trying to defy gravity, but there a shitton of unknown unsolved problems. You can't promise or create marketing for a feature unless we already know it's possible. For starters.

But the issue is worse than that. What generally happens is once one part of the new engine is barely working, they demand another new invention that has to be completes in the same deadline before the other one has corner cases examined even.

>>ilaksh+(OP)
And you don’t really know if anyone wants an engine, although the word got banded about in some initial conversations. You could ask the customer but they want faster horses, and you are not allowed to talk to them anyway as you are assumed to not have stakeholder skills plus you are paid too much to not be coding.

>>ilaksh+(OP)
Sorry only just saw this.

I'm a software developer, have been for my whole career, so I know what building software is like. And while I agree that sometimes there are significant unknowns to resolve, and these can require large amounts of time, still the company has to market and prepare to sell the product before it's finished, otherwise as I said the company has to wait months or even years to get paying customers, by which time a) they'll have burned a huge amount of money without seeing any return and b) they may have missed their market opportunity. In the case of B2B transactions, the customer may have made significant operational decisions based on the deadline they've agreed to, and the supplier missing that deadline can have serious repercussions for a relationship that may have taken many years to build.

And come on, let's be honest - most of the time we're not designing a new type of aircraft engine. We're building something that looks very much like existing engines in general form, but with specifics that are different. I know it's hard, and I know estimates are a significant source of pain, but we need to have some sympathy for the rest of the company that's ultimately bringing in the piles of money that we get paid.