alt Hacker NewsPharmaceutical 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.
Yes, that's my point. There's way more uncertainty in trying to bring a new drug to market or build a new bridge than creating yet another CRUD app, yet somehow they are any able to break these efforts into tasks that can be estimated and tracked and many software engineers think they should be exempt from any accountability to schedule or budget.