Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability

I dislike doing non-novel things. I dislike being paid for it. If I estimate accurately, it&#x27;s probably not novel.<p>I dislike accurate estimates.<p>I&#x27;ll do them, but I&#x27;m happy when I do it in 3x the time, not sad. And I certainly don&#x27;t feel like I wwasted my time.<p>I just can&#x27;t seem to find any employers or customers who feel the same way.

What the author said is very true. We should accept that there is no good way to estimate the schedule because each software is inherently new. Simply that it will be done when it is done.

I&#x27;ve seen a trend in HN where the comments from a previous story are cherry picked by a third party and turned into a blog post, which is then submitted to HN. It could be coincidence, but it looks like that&#x27;s what happened here. The counter-argument is that great minds think alike.

&quot;Pretty much every piece of technology and algorithm that I use has been known since the 70&#x27;s and the only thing I do is hook up those technologies in various ways to accomplish a goal. To say that it is &quot;novel&quot; or &quot;unpredictable&quot; is definitely a mischaracterization.&quot;

&quot;&quot;&quot; it&#x27;s likely that adapting old code to a new context is less work than starting from square one again. &quot;&quot;&quot;<p>It has been measured that changing more than 25% of software incurs more than 100% of the cost. So your mileage may vary.

Contrast:<p>&quot;You mean you <i>didn&#x27;t</i> have a complete design for that bridge before you started building it??&quot;<p>&quot;You mean you waterfall designed and implemented your YC app project??&quot;

Theoretically true, but in practice you see millions of programmers doing &quot;more of the same&quot; and &quot;yet another&quot;

True for some projects, not true at all for many others. If you build e-commerce online stores, or other standard sorts of offerings, you may very well be able to &quot;lay the bricks&quot; in a very predictable amount of time after you&#x27;ve done a few.