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Comment by halayli | Hacker News Reader

This is more or less reverse reasoning starting with a false equivalence. Most construction projects that are a tad different than the typical go over budget and over time. Most construction projects are thesame. If you ask a software engineer to build the same project repetitively, they can give you a very reasonable estimation.

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The cool thing with software engineering is that we can drive the costs of building the same project repetitively down to zero. We don't have to write Postgres from scratch each time we spin up a CRUD app, we can just install it.

I think that's why estimation in software engineering is difficult. The predictable repetitive portion of the project takes up no time - all that's left are the novel unknown parts.

"time estimates from software devs actually make sense if you think of them as 'this is how long it would take me the second time if i did this twice in a row'"

(Source: https://twitter.com/mechanical_monk/status/17468921975201382...)

Most construction projects are the same.

That is not the case.

It is just that there’s no drama in on-time and on-budget.

Construction projects are so rarely on time and on budget, it’s a trope.

I started in AEC in 1989. Most of the built environment happens without drama because only professionals are involved. Never showing up in the news except as a press release. And then usually not.

When amateurs are involved, so are unrealistic expectations. When politicians are involved, so is political grandstanding.

Finally, when the value of a project is the future revenue generated, budgets and schedules don’t extrapolate from your household experience.

Zero is the median number of construction projects people are involved in.

So if we exclude custom homes, small scale residential, government/public, and small and medium commercial, then everything goes well?

We could make similar claims about software probably, eh?

I also had to do a double-take at the blatant falsity of this statement. Software estimation is only hard when it's the first time you're doing it. Unfortunately, most software is a first-time.

There are very few specialty shops which only do the same type of project over and over. This is probably also because such repetitive work would quickly be turned into a "framework" to do more of such work, leaving only the novel stuff for each project, which would then become difficult again.

In the real world, I guess that matches up with the "prefab" type of construction.

Most software is NOT first time! You have competition doing it as well. One website is just like another - sure there are lots of differences, but they are as alike as any two houses with different blueprints are the same. Most software is updates to the existing software of a similar type to last years update. Even ground up software is typically a rewrite of your existing software.

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