alt Hacker NewsIf software developers want to be then seriously as a profession, they need to be able to provide and justify estimates for their work.
Everything you said could apply to a new bridge, building, pharmaceutical compound, or anything else that is the result of a process with some known and some unknown steps.
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> Everything you said could apply to a new bridge, building, pharmaceutical compound
"Everything"? So
> predictable and repetitive tasks are also the kinds of tasks that are most easily automated, which means the time it takes to perform those tasks should asymptotically approach 0.
Also applies to bridges? Bridges require a ton of manual human input at every stage of construction, regardless of how predictable and repetitive the work is. With software, we can write software to make those tasks disappear. I've yet to see the bridge that can build itself.
Pharmaceutical compounds frequently don't make it to market after significant investment.
No one in that industry is giving estimates based on developing brand new drugs - they're giving estimates related to manufacturing lead times, unalterable physics time lines, and typical time to navigate administrative tasks which are well known and generally predictable (but also negotiable: regulations have a human on the other end). All of this after they have a candidate drug in hand.
Same story with bridge building basically: no one puts an estimate on coming up with a brand new bridge design: they're a well understood, scalable engineering constructions which are the mostly gated by your ability to collect the data needed to use them - i.e. a field survey team etc. - and also once again, regulatory processes and accountability.
Drug discovery chemists do not, to my knowledge, provide estimates on how long it will take them to discover a marketable drug.