Comment by chrisfosterelli

Yes, my claim is absolutely not that they're good at it haha.

Estimation is a real problem in a lot of industries, including ours, and I think that's probably common ground here -- I suppose my differing position is that I think the solution is to get better at it, not to refuse to do it.

I've been on projects where I've seen the budget explode and projects where I've seen the budget kept tight and on track. The latter is very hard and requires effort from ALL sides to work, but it's almost always achievable.

I actually empathize a little bit more with megaprojects because generally the larger the budget the harder it will be to keep on track in my experience. Most estimates we're asked to give in our day jobs are not even multi-million dollar estimates.

Also I'm using budget and estimate interchangeably but these are of course different things -- that's one of my nitpicks is that we often treat these as the same thing when we talk about estimating being hard. A lot of individual estimates can be very wrong without affecting the ultimate budget.