This is clever advice, to first find out what estimate is tolerable to management and then adapt your design to fit. It's sort of like what the makers of Basecamp, in their book Getting Real, say in chapter 7, "Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope"<https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/02.4-fix-time-and-budget-fl...>.

I wonder if it was a mistake to ever call it "engineering", because that leads people to think that software engineering is akin to mechanical or civil engineering, where you hire one expensive architect to do the design, and then hand off the grunt work to lower-paid programmers to bang out the code in a repetitive and predictable timeline with no more hard thinking needed. I think that Jack Reeves was right when he said, in 1992, that every line of code is architecture. The grunt work of building it afterward is the job of the compiler and linker. Therefore every time you write code, you are still working on the blueprint. "What is Software Design?"<https://www.bleading-edge.com/Publications/C++Journal/Cpjour...>

Martin Fowler cites this in his 2005 essay about agile programming, "The New Methodology"<https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html>. Jeff Atwood, also in 2005, explains why software is so different from engineering physical objects, because the laws of physics constrain houses and bridges and aircraft. "Bridges, Software Engineering, and God"<https://blog.codinghorror.com/bridges-software-engineering-a...>. All this explains not only why estimates are so hard but also why two programs can do the same thing but one is a thousand lines of code and one is a million.

I came into programming from a liberal arts background, specifically writing, not science or math. I see a lot of similarities between programming and writing. Both let you say the same thing an infinite number of ways. I think I benefitted more from Strunk and White's advice to "omit needless words" than I might have from a course in how to build city hall.