> If it was mostly untrue, they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job.
This is incredibly naive. The same logic would say that if project estimates were mostly wrong in a given company then they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job. And yet project estimation is notoriously terrible across the whole industry.
Accurate engineering estimates don't have good product/market fit.
You can't get management sign-off on a project that you accurately state will take 4 years, so you will instead just have to maintain and extend the old solution. That's the case where there's no competition.
In a competitive market for engineering estimates, the low estimator will tend to win the bid.
Meanwhile, you'll experience high turnover in your engineers, because you rightly want to only do maintenance, and management doesn't think that you need to pay high salaries to keep the knowledge in house.
So management doesn't want to fund projects with accurate estimates, and engineers don't want to give accurately high estimates for projects they want to undertake.
Saying it's being done badly is not the same as saying that one could do it better. Some things are hard to do, hard to incentivise, or both. And sometimes there really is a dollar bill lying in the street.
Some things also, weirdly, turn out to be unimportant. If you start a company with great project estimates internally but a mediocre product, you’ll fail. And if you make a great product but struggle to estimate feature costs internally, you’ll do fine.
It sure would be nice if we could all correctly estimate costs, but accurate estimates are clearly not essential for startups to crush it.
This is incredibly naive. The same logic would say that if project estimates were mostly wrong in a given company then they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job. And yet project estimation is notoriously terrible across the whole industry.