Estimates you get are what the estimator thinks you will pay (mostly) not how much it costs them.

Prices in the real world are barely linked to costs. Budget risks are bundled in markets with high variance.

Even to the extent that is true it doesn’t change my argument at all.

Maybe I don't see the relevance of your question then.

Software developers are not negotiating fixed price contracts with their project managers every two weeks. Just how toxic such a situation would be should be obvious. Managers need to understand the context of the job and determine if they're satisfied with the productivity of their employees.

Agile is a development process not a contract pricing strategy. If anything proponents of "Agile" would be more hesitant to quote you a firm fixed price contract than "Waterfall" teams.

They don’t have to hire you every two weeks but they are paying for you and do have to decide how to allocate your time and plan various projects with interlocking dependencies. How can they do that without even a rough idea of how many people it takes for how long to accomplish anything? You are, in effect, still asking them to write you a blank check to accomplish something when they might want to change gears if apprised of how difficult it is.

> How can they do that without even a rough idea of how many people it takes for how long to accomplish anything?

This is not exclusive to scrum.

If you go way back up in this thread the reason given for Scrum being bad is it features estimation, which is useless because it's inaccurate, so telling me that systems other than Scrum feature estimation is not a rebuttal.

This is not really a discussion in good faith.

> the reason given for Scrum being bad is it features estimation

This seems like a strawman and not at all what I was picking up from further up the thread.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Can you tell me how I was supposed to interpret “it is impossible to do good estimation” as a criticism of Scrum, then?

Research. We’re researching cures to cancer, nuclear fusion, space flight, etc. with no idea what the total cost of ownership will be.

Software dev can resemble research on a smaller scale. The more interesting or complex your requirements and environment, the closer it resembles research.

The original point of agile was to lean into this fact and get out of planning and predicting. Scrum culture has corrupted this goal.

Yeah it turns out if your object is having working software to use to make money you’re not that interested in the mysteries of theory.