No one in that industry is giving estimates based on developing brand new drugs - they're giving estimates related to manufacturing lead times, unalterable physics time lines, and typical time to navigate administrative tasks which are well known and generally predictable (but also negotiable: regulations have a human on the other end). All of this after they have a candidate drug in hand.
Same story with bridge building basically: no one puts an estimate on coming up with a brand new bridge design: they're a well understood, scalable engineering constructions which are the mostly gated by your ability to collect the data needed to use them - i.e. a field survey team etc. - and also once again, regulatory processes and accountability.
The fact that people in many industries are not good at estimating doesn't mean that it's impossible in software development specifically and uniquely, as was originally claimed.
"Everything"? So
> predictable and repetitive tasks are also the kinds of tasks that are most easily automated, which means the time it takes to perform those tasks should asymptotically approach 0.
Also applies to bridges? Bridges require a ton of manual human input at every stage of construction, regardless of how predictable and repetitive the work is. With software, we can write software to make those tasks disappear. I've yet to see the bridge that can build itself.
2. You can estimate the duration of each step of a process, regardless of how much human involvement is required.
Estimating the duration of each step of a process only works when you know what the steps are.
That said, implementation is one part of developing software. Design and test are also necessary and can take a non trivial amount of time.
And yes, you need to know what the steps are to build something. If you don't, you don't know what you're doing, which is a bad thing.
In my limited exposure to the industry, that's not how it worked. They have budgets, timelines, and progress is tracked as it is determined whether there is a viable path to a marketable drug.
Everything you said could apply to a new bridge, building, pharmaceutical compound, or anything else that is the result of a process with some known and some unknown steps.