> the inability of software engineers to provide good estimates
I don't think it's inability. I think they're embedded in a system that doesn't encourage or reward honesty or accuracy.
I agree it's easy for people to say, "Gosh, how hard can that be?" Which is where we get the classic, "I could build that in a week" estimate. But I don't agree that there's something inevitable about people going from a finger-in-the-air SWAG to a "we'll have self-driving cars in 2021" business plan.
Normally I'd say that it's a straight up failure of both management techniques and the professional standards of the engineers. Which is true. But I think the problem is that a lot of fundraising in the "Uber for X" era is only slightly less of a con than Theranos. So I think it's more correctly seen as a failure of founders and VCs.
At some point, when you're talking about a concrete and complete plan, you likely go from naive self-deception to the willful deception of others.
Of course, one should consider how people's tendency to naive self-deception makes things easier for willful deceivers.
As a scheme for selling an impossible dreams takes shape, I suspect the actors have a strange and contradictory mindset. A rational conman is going to sell a smallish scam and vanish. The folks running Theranos certainly deceived many but they also rode the train far past the point where they could avoid being caught in the wreck (so they wound-up ruined, looking at jail time, etc). Maybe they had belief that if they kept the charade going long enough could make the original scheme work but they could also have a sort of thinking that simply doesn't look at the possibility of failure once they have decided to seek success.
I don't think it's inability. I think they're embedded in a system that doesn't encourage or reward honesty or accuracy.
I agree it's easy for people to say, "Gosh, how hard can that be?" Which is where we get the classic, "I could build that in a week" estimate. But I don't agree that there's something inevitable about people going from a finger-in-the-air SWAG to a "we'll have self-driving cars in 2021" business plan.
Normally I'd say that it's a straight up failure of both management techniques and the professional standards of the engineers. Which is true. But I think the problem is that a lot of fundraising in the "Uber for X" era is only slightly less of a con than Theranos. So I think it's more correctly seen as a failure of founders and VCs.