How I estimate work

Estimating in points that are basically a Fibonacci sequence keep estimation precision limited and avoids implying false guarantees. Yes, in the end the chosen stories are based on summing to a number of points that is roughly equivalent to what the team has achieved per-sprint in the recent past, so in that sense it is ultimately estimating days in the end. But again, for whatever psychological reason, people seem to be more realistic about the variance in actual delivered points per sprint, as opposed to when you try to measure things in hours or days. The points imply more of an estimated goal than a deadline guarantee, which helps keep both team expectations and management expectations more reasonable.

tl;dr: Psychology.

If you're truly creating such unique and valuable software that it is to be compared to the world's engineering megaprojects in its challenge then perhaps it is beyond being beholden to a budget. Who am I to say?

But 99.9% of this industry isn't doing that and should probably be able to estimate their work.

Here are literally the top two Google results for "story points" and they both seem to align entirely with what I said:

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/estimatio...

https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/what-are-story-poi...

I don't doubt that what you're describing as story points is something somebody told you. I'm just telling you that their definition was highly idiosyncratic and extremely non-standard. When discussing these things, using the standard definitions is helpful.

Part of it is absolutely our fault; part of it is the industry.

In the electronics world, when you need , you can find an off-the-shelf part that fits your requirements, fit that part in and it'll work. When you need logic in a hardware device, nobody's rolling their own CPU from discrete parts - they just take the cheapest microcontroller fitting the requirements.

In the software world we don't seem to have this concept of building blocks for common functionality even decades into the industry. Most software projects are some flavor of CRUD app with custom logic operating on the CRUDed objects. You'd think all the complexity would be in the custom logic, but actually it's at best 50-50 and at worst most of the complexity is in the whole CRUD bullshit and not what happens to the object once it's CRUD'ed.

How come in 2026 there's still no way to have an off-the-shelf component I can buy to do "I have a table of objects on the server, and I want to expose this as a UI to the client"? Why do I still see people writing this by hand in React/$JS-framework-of-the-day and messing around with things like OpenAPI and/or writing serializers/deserializers by hand? I swear most of the work I see in the web development space is the minutia between client/server communication.

I think there are several reasons:

* overengineering/resume-driven-development: even if there was to be an off-the-shelf component to do the task, people would probably avoid it and prefer to bullshit around reimplementing a (worse) solution. That's already the case where people are using React/SPAs/etc for views that do no need any interactivity and could just be an HTML form.

* political choices influencing tech selection: more often than not some tech or service provider is selected based on political reasons and not technical, and then the engineering challenge becomes as to how to shoehorn this ill-fitting part into our solution.

* aversion to paid software: hardware engineers are expected and allowed to select parts that cost money. I've never been on a software project where we had an explicit budget for licensing software. Reaching for paid software became the least resort option I'd have to fight for and burn political points, while spending 10x the cost building a (shittier) replica in-house was considered fine.

Due to the last point there's also little incentive for software providers to build and sell such components, so the market is quite small and not competitive, with the (very few) competitors having their own dealbreakers. Firebase will give you the instant database and UI, but then you're forever tied to paying them rent. You can't just license the server component and install it in-house like you can buy an FPGA.