Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my French, but it's a load of bollocks. Sure, I hate estimating and I'm bad at it, but I've worked with many others who were better than me at it and did consistently deliver what promised, when they promised it. And yes I'd much rather just sit and contemplate and re-re-rework 'the design' and be all-important about 'it's done when it's done' - but I fully well understand that any customer will just fire me and take someone who just does what he says he will.

Building construction is also fraught with unexpected events and project management issues etc., but I'd laugh any building who would propose that I just keep paying them until it's done, or who will start building and go home when whatever budget I give him is used, out of the room. Why would my customers be any different?

(articles like this poison the minds of young impressionable developers who think it's actually reasonable to have ideas like this, btw, which is why we shouldn't just shrug them off)

>Building construction is also fraught with unexpected events and project management issues etc., but I'd laugh any building who would propose that I just keep paying them until it's done,

In practice, though, this is exactly how building construction and civil engineering works. After all, if the bridge is half-built, what's the customer going to do? Walk away? When was the last time you heard about any large civil engineering project coming in on time or on budget? It's to the point where we're relieved when the project ends up within an order of magnitude of its projected cost.

>After all, if the bridge is half-built, what's the customer going to do?

Maybe sue you for liquidated damages whilst pursuing all other possible avenues in the contract for claiming against a breach. Maybe file an insurance claim, and weather the mobilization costs for another contractor to take over your scope.

But before any of that you first have to estimate the potential legal costs and determine what's going to work more in your favor. :)

Actually, that's an excellent point -- how do buildings/bridges/etc. actually get built? I mean, laugh if you will, but can you not think of any examples of construction projects that straight up ran out of money and had to halt? Or that became enormous money and time sinks, inching their way but never-quite-making it to completion?

As I understand it (still pretty new to the industry), we're supposed to give realistic estimates for a product's completion, considering that 1. requirements are always incomplete and 2. unexpected complications will always arise. 'Done' is a moving target, and part of its estimation is ensuring the product is deliverable at every stage (with varying degrees of completeness), regardless of whether how many times everything goes pear shaped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_(tunnel_boring_machine)

Seattle's current pear-shaped project. Check out the missed estimates!

Sure. Developments get abandoned all the time, either because they run out of time and money or because economic conditions change. One I was reading about recent is the Fontainbleu Resort in Las Vegas[1]—the second-tallest building on the Strip and unfinished.

And even more developments end up hilariously past their budget on both time and money. "Megaprojects" like the Big Dig[2] are common examples of this.

These are the failures big enough to be notable. I'm sure there are far more smaller, less interesting but more indicative failed projects as well.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontainebleau_Resort_Las_Vegas

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

It was more of a rhetorical question, with the remaining literalness directed at the OP :) but yeah, those are fantastic examples! The Berlin Brandenburg [1] was what came to mind immediately, but you're absolutely right that history is like to be littered with other dead developments.

[1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-23/how-berlin...

There is a huge difference between building a bridge and building a piece of software.

The complexity is just many many times bigger when it comes to software projects. With bridges it's actually fairly straight forward and the budgets are often of a completely different scale.

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