This is not true for most. Imagine going to a contractor to get a house built and they tell you that they can’t tell you what it will cost or when it will be done.
As almost everyone knows, construction delays and cost overruns are the norm, not the outlyer. Construction projects here very often suffer dearly from the "2 more weeks and/or a couple more thousand dollars" overrun issues.
In fact, I'm sure at least several people who have been trapped in a home renovation nightmare LOLed deeply after reading your post.
These stories are SO common (and I've seen it in my own family too) that I truly question the sanity of anyone who takes on a home renovation project.
Houses (not housing tracts) tend to be built by much smaller contractors who are in absolutely no position to absorb any setback without going bankrupt, you can't apply the rules for 'big business' to small time operators and expect the exact same outcome.
Constructing resorts also has all kinds of economies of scale that building individual houses does not.
This is very doable in software, and I’ve seen it done for decades from all levels of the org chart.
Overshooting deadlines and increasing costs due to materials not being available or them suddenly costing twice as much is normal.
Also coordination between all the various contractors is always getting messed up because the person putting up the scaffolding didn't show up, so the plumber cannot work and cannot come back for 3 weeks, which messes up the plan for the drywall, which gets pushed back, and so on.
They could probably do it more accurately but it would lose them bids, so they knowingly low-ball it. You shouldn’t have that problem inside a company doing software.
Engineers low ball partly because they don’t know what’s involved in a new piece of work. Like walking between two points on a map; they don’t know what they’ll run into on the ground.
Managers and stake holders then bully the engineers into lowering the estimates because even that’s not quick enough. Worse, they scale the team without discussion without realising that will make the project harder to deliver.
The only way you are going to get a hard quote is if you buy a prefab or a house that the contractor has already put up multiple times (and even then there will be some room for adjustment). Oh, and foundations are a completely different story.
Or this: imagine seeking an estimate on when a house will be built, trimmed, painted, furnished, decorated, and filled with every item needed practically and for comfort by the homeowner.
It’s a living process that requires continuous reassessment of priorities and scope, and in fact never finishes when you consider the life of the home.
It absolutely is; look at some of the biggest and most successful software companies in the world. No-one has any idea what facebook will cost or when it will be done (Zuckerberg has said that he was off by at least 5 orders of magnitude IIRC). No-one has any idea what google will cost or when it will be done. No-one has any idea what amazon will cost or when it will be done. No-one has any idea what netflix will cost or when it will be done.
By contrast, software development is doing stuff that hasn't been done before. You may be lucky, and have done something similar. If it's really been done before, you would ideally be using something off the shelf.
For me, a project manager who uses this analogy has no place running a software project.
Also, tons of software dev isn't actually about pushing boundaries or doing something that hasn't been done before. In fact, I'd say most development is about implementing known solutions but in a customized way. Just like every other engineering field.
And the project managers who use the analogy don’t make the comparison with significant and novel civil engineering projects. They make the comparison with having their kitchen extended.
That's the reality of software development.