by dkarl | 2025-04-02 13:45:25+00:00
This is literally the FIRST bullshit I was fed when I started my software development career. Buildings are always on time because they're too important to be finished late! Buildings are expensive! Buildings are serious! If a house wasn't finished on time, a family might have to find somewhere else to live! If a sports stadium wasn't finished on time, the season would be ruined! If an office building wasn't finished on time, businesses with leases would have to find other office space! Hundreds of millions of dollars would be lost! Nobody could afford that, and it doesn't happen, because the people who build buildings understand How Important It Is! If programmers would just grow up and start acting like responsible adults like the people who build buildings, maybe start wearing collared shirts to work, then they would start shipping software on time!

Yeah, except all of those things do happen. Families spend months renting while their new house gets built. My city's new professional sports team played on the road the first several months of their first season, like the previous two expansion teams before them, because the stadium was behind schedule. Office buildings with 100% of their office space pre-leased have to push back their opening dates, leaving all their new tenants in the lurch and giving them the right to cancel their leases and go elsewhere. It turns out construction estimation is not reliable, either, despite the fact that much of construction is more analogous to a software build process than a software development process.

A lot of the reasons are pretty common-sense, and many will sound familiar to software developers:

- New building products that were expected to be drop-in replacements for older products turn out to have unexpected limitations.

- Available labor isn't as familiar with materials as expected.

- Economic conditions change, and it takes longer than expected to get materials.

- Economic conditions change, and the client decides to make changes to the project in response.

- Something about the site that was expected to be discovered during site engineering gets discovered at the beginning of construction instead.

- Another project going over schedule or over budget has a cascading effect.

- Labor becomes so scarce that construction has to be started late.

- Materials are accidentally ruined on site, and they can't be replaced quickly. (Imagine that a junior engineer arrived early one morning and ran a bunch of builds on a broken branch. Now you're scrambling to locate a supplier who can get you more build juice, and they all have a two week lead time.)

Unlike in software, money and time can often be traded off in construction. When labor and materials become scarce, you can pay extra to be the project that gets the best available, or gets them at all. This can create the appearance of more money buying better estimation, which is true to an extent, but sometimes it's simply a consequence of bigger projects have more on the line and more cash available. If you are building a $1m house, you are likely to discover that the team building a $5m house across town can afford to pay more to stay on schedule than you can. Likewise if you're building a $10m commercial building and something gets scarce, it's a good bet that the $100m project across town will offer more for it. They'll finish on time, you'll just have to wait.