On 8/18/2011 8:04, Invisible wrote:
> The question is, why does this kind of nonsense only happen in IT?

Because IT is all virtual. Nobody who doesn't understand what's going on 
knows how to evaluate the results.

Someone can look at a bridge across a wide river and say "Heck, no way any 
sane person can build it for $4000."  But there's no concept there for software.

Plus, people will request changes and expect they're trivial. But sometimes 
it's like saying "I know you're half way through building the 50-story 
office building, but can we add another floor above the third floor, and 
move the elevators to the other side?"  Nobody would make a request like 
that and expect it to be 1/50th the cost of the building to add another 
floor in the middle, but people are happy to do that with software. That's 
why my rule of thumb is to try to structure software so the naive intuition 
about how much work it'll take roughly matches how much work it'll actually 
take.

> So if it doesn't happen in structural engineering, why the hell does it
> constantly happen in software engineering?

Because people understand physics, and they don't understand informatics. 
Plus, people doing structural stuff like that aren't doing something 
entirely new, but people don't duplicate what's already done in software. 
Floor 35 of a 50-story building will probably take as long to build as floor 
34 of a 50-story building. But nobody does that stuff in software, because 
you'd just make each floor a subroutine.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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