Honestly, I feel the real lesson here is that, if you want accurate estimates, the job needs to be done end-to-end by someone who's done the exact same thing before - and because things change, "before" really means "recently".
If you're not going to be moving houses every couple months, this means passing the buck to someone else. That is, the job needs to be done by some professional installers, because they're in a position to do the same thing day after day, and can gradually adapt to variance and evolution of products (and plumbing, and homes).
Also, and that's a second step, from the POV of those installers, it would be ideal if they could also pick the washing machine for you - they'd just pick pick the minimum amount of machines[0] to cover common scenarios, and specialize in installing them. That would significantly improve accuracy of their estimates.
But this is, unfortunately, how we get to turning everything in life into a service, and it doesn't sit well with me. I'm willing to accept bad estimates if it means I get to pick and own stuff. After all, this is the model ISPs operate on, and we all know what kind of hardware they install. My first criterion for picking ISPs has always been whether they let you put your own router in place of theirs.
> the job needs to be done by some professional installers, because they're in a position to do the same thing day after day,
Possibly - it depends on the situation. In my experience, the transaction costs of getting people in can be pretty high.
After all, if a guy has to drive 40 minutes to me, perform a 10 minute job, then drive 40 minutes back - I gotta expect to pay for 90 minutes of his time.
And if some install jobs involve lifting a 160 lbs machine by hand, that's a two-man job - now I'm paying for two guys for 90 minutes. Or they want to see the job to check if it needs two guys before they can quote accurately - meaning another round trip.
Oh, and my job doesn't let me work from home, so I gotta take a day off work.
There's also tons of benefits for DYI if done in a correct balance. It allows you to later communicate with professionals more efficiently and figure out who is actually a quality professional, debug issues with the setup you have, make better decisions in the future. I think when owning a house, if something does not pose a significant long term risk health or damage wise, it's wise to at least try and spend few hours on figuring out the DYI. Unless you have serious FU money where you can hire a single, trusted person to just orchestrate everything for you.
6. Cost of "hey man I actually don't have time for your job today, I'll do it next week, sorry"
7. Cost of they just don't show up and you have no idea what happened
8. Cost of trying to call them after 7 to reschedule, it goes to voicemail, but the voicemail is full so you can't leave a message, so you text them, but they don't read texts, so you just have to keep calling all them and hope to get lucky and catch them between jobs
9. Cost of you get frustrated by 8 so you decide to hire someone more established who has a secretary, but the secretary is clueless and gives you misinformation mixed with "I'll ask him and get back to you" (of course never gets back)
10. Cost of you having a flexible sleep schedule, so you usually wake up at 11am, but they want to come at 9am or you have to wait who knows how long, so previous night you are stressed about getting too little sleep, ending with getting no sleep at all because of the stress.
As a reminder it took him only 4 hours. I also had a similar case recently. Except I have much less experience and I tried to involve professionals as much as possible.
It took more than a week overall. I don't see a real world where you can involve professionals and get it done in just 4 hours. I would have been ecstatic with just 4 hours.
I first talked with customer support of an electronics store, I took bunch of pictures of my setup, I asked several questions before hand. I bought both bringing the washing machine and installation from an electronics shop with best reputation locally. It wasn't clear where the water extract hole should be, I did figure it out talking back and forth with another specialist though. But the shop said that they can't do installation there. So I said, okay, let's drop the installation, just deliver the washing machine to the room. I asked multiple times if that involves also bringing it to the 2nd floor. And the customer support said yes.
Then when the delivery finally came, the guy said they only bring to the front door and the first room, not 2nd floor. Luckily he was still able to help me out, we together brought it to the 2nd floor, but he was alone so wasn't prepared, and it weighed quite a bit.
In terms of installation he said he can't help with that.
Then I was talking to a specialist who had helped us on some other things, and with back and forth I managed to understand what to buy, but I had to do multiple shop trips, since the things I needed weren't in the really large construction shop I went to (related to water extraction). I'm not English speaker so I don't know the correct terminology for all of this here.
Then there were other issues, such as machine started vibrating after, etc, etc. Which I managed to solve eventually.
But point being is that even finding, managing, scheduling and using specialists can take way more than 4h that it took him.
In Germany this wouldn't be possible due to shortage of skilled workers. You'd have to settle with one who at least might have a bigger toolbox, but they wouldn't to an end-to-end analysis beforehand and would prefer to get the job done fast even if sluggishly.
Recently I asked for quotes on adding a power socket to a din-rail fuse box. Easy job: cut two cables to proper length, screw one of them to the neutral rail, use a splitter after the fuse to get phase.
"We don't do that, ask your power company". "Don't have time, 80€ before taxes, in 8 months".
I would do it myself, but it's in the shared area of an apartment house and the slightest issue with it would void pretty much all my insurances.
I've been getting a lot of the same, from reputable companies, and then if I want a single person to get it all done, I have to have a connection I can definitely trust and does quality?
> Honestly, I feel the real lesson here is that, if you want accurate estimates, the job needs to be done end-to-end by someone who's done the exact same thing before - and because things change, "before" really means "recently".
I think I inadvertently addressed my attitude toward estimating software by forgetting estimation was even part of the topic. Heh… IMO the real lesson is that no one has ever done exactly the same thing before, otherwise you’re almost certainly paying too much for someone to do it again. In which case estimating is futile, until you’ve done sufficient work to approximate already doing the task under estimation. You can estimate when you’re reasonably close to completion, but the important skill is learning to recognize patterns… including the pattern that you’re facing unknown unknowns, and an unknown scope of same… and then to make the path to resolution more efficient.
If you're not going to be moving houses every couple months, this means passing the buck to someone else. That is, the job needs to be done by some professional installers, because they're in a position to do the same thing day after day, and can gradually adapt to variance and evolution of products (and plumbing, and homes).
Also, and that's a second step, from the POV of those installers, it would be ideal if they could also pick the washing machine for you - they'd just pick pick the minimum amount of machines[0] to cover common scenarios, and specialize in installing them. That would significantly improve accuracy of their estimates.
But this is, unfortunately, how we get to turning everything in life into a service, and it doesn't sit well with me. I'm willing to accept bad estimates if it means I get to pick and own stuff. After all, this is the model ISPs operate on, and we all know what kind of hardware they install. My first criterion for picking ISPs has always been whether they let you put your own router in place of theirs.