Drew Crawford on the mismatch between the price of off-the-shelf and custom-built software, on effort estimates, and on the general public’s skewed expectations:

I have been involved in far too many projects where the development timeline and costs for a project were decided, not investigated. You may be working in such an organization now. I regularly participate in conference calls with people who explain to me how long it will take to do my job. In fact, that is the state of the industry. Perhaps eventually, the project will fail, and you can whip out some e-mail from six months ago and say “I told you so.” But more likely, you will work 60-hour weeks for a while, and then get blamed when the project goes awry. We have billion-dollar web browsers for free, why should it take 3 months to write an inventory system? That’s pretty much how those things go.