Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, in my opinion it is never legitimate to pressure people into predicting the future, and it simply never works. There is a very this counter-intuitive thing about predicting the future. We tend to believe that by cutting our predictions in smaller and smaller pieces, our predictions will be closer to reality, or at least more manageable. But there is nothing further from the truth, the best predictions are…
Indeed we disagree. I’d say the reluctance that’s relatively wide spread in particularly among engineers to even try and reduce risk as much as possible (within a limited scope) and framing that as „predicting the future“ is a huge fallacy that doesn’t benefit anyone. There’s just not only the 2 extremes - completely and reliably predicting the future vs. just going off with no plan - but there’s something in the mid…
I am perfectly aware of the difficulties of managing projects and keeping clients happy.
From my experience, what you are describing is something few founders are concerned about, because they understand and embrace risk.
On the other hand middle-management is always trying to push their peons to predict the future and accept the liability.