I don't think this is as much a story about complexity as it is the benefit of specialist experience and tools.
This would have been a very short project if a specialist with all of the right tools and parts were summoned versus the five-trips-to-the-hardware-store-for-what-must-surely-be-the-last-thing-this-time story it turned out to be.
We've all been there. If you're a specialist (such as a software developer), there's little reason not to hire specialists for things like appliance installation. Just because you can do it yourself, doesn't mean you should.
By all means, design and screenprint your own t-shirts and label art and photocopy your zine or whatever. But if you know the job might need 3 different kinds of wrenches, just roll a truck that has 20 wrenches on it already.
None of the "unknown unknowns" to him are actually unknown to a specialist. Of course someone with no experience is going to take 20x longer, they're learning on the job.
Life is short, we're all going to be dead soon. Don't waste it on repeated trips to a retail store to buy meaningless hardware and tools.
Just because I can write frontend software doesn't mean I should; I'd hire a frontend dev who knows all of the tools and libraries and stuff, because the last time I did it was 8 years ago and everything is different now. It'd take me days just to become useful.
Sure, and the author explicitly acknowledges that a professional who'd done this a ton of times wouldn't have these problems, and would complete the job quickly. The point of the article is not to marvel about complexity, it's to remind people that whenever you're doing something new, your estimates can't be trusted.
The author also suggests that many software development tasks will be new, or be new enough to make your estimates unreliable. That is, even if it's a task you've done before, if any amount of time has passed, it's likely that quite a few of the details have changed, and your estimates will still be off.
> Just because you can do it yourself, doesn't mean you should.
The flip side of this is that sometimes it's fun. I've been doing a bunch of home improvement tasks lately that in the past I would probably call a professional to do. They take me longer to complete, and I have to buy some specialized tools, but I find the process enjoyable, and I learn things every time. (And even after buying the tools, it still ends up being cheaper than hiring someone.)
I'm currently thinking about adding recessed lighting to the walls along the base of the staircase in my house. The lighting in the staircase is too dim, but I don't want to replace the existing fixtures (for reasons I don't want to get into). I'll have to cut holes for new electrical boxes, and run new romex along the entire thing. This will probably be my most ambitious project to date, and I may screw up the drywall repair and need to hire someone to make it look nice. But I'm probably going to give it a go, and I'll learn things and have fun along the way.
This would have been a very short project if a specialist with all of the right tools and parts were summoned versus the five-trips-to-the-hardware-store-for-what-must-surely-be-the-last-thing-this-time story it turned out to be.
We've all been there. If you're a specialist (such as a software developer), there's little reason not to hire specialists for things like appliance installation. Just because you can do it yourself, doesn't mean you should.
By all means, design and screenprint your own t-shirts and label art and photocopy your zine or whatever. But if you know the job might need 3 different kinds of wrenches, just roll a truck that has 20 wrenches on it already.
None of the "unknown unknowns" to him are actually unknown to a specialist. Of course someone with no experience is going to take 20x longer, they're learning on the job.
Life is short, we're all going to be dead soon. Don't waste it on repeated trips to a retail store to buy meaningless hardware and tools.
Just because I can write frontend software doesn't mean I should; I'd hire a frontend dev who knows all of the tools and libraries and stuff, because the last time I did it was 8 years ago and everything is different now. It'd take me days just to become useful.