This is not unique to SV. This is happening world over. The wealthier are buying more assets, the middle and lower classes are left paying rent to the wealthy landowners. "Gary's Economics" has tons of material on wealth inequality and its impacts.
I went as a contractor (fixing a port from PDP 11/44 -> SUN 5/110) on-board a UK nuclear sub back in the 90s, and had a contractor berth in the 'bomb shop'. I slept underneath the Tigerfish MK24 torpedoes, smelly and greasy, but i don't remember it being cold !!
Some good stuff in there, but heard most of it in earlier publications. Reading Steve McConnell's "Software Estimation" covers a bunch of it, Cone of Uncertainty etc etc.
Here's where i've seen estimation become accurate:
1) The people doing the work are estimating the work, and KNOW the software base they are estimating for.
2) Technology being used is not shifting considerably for the piece being estimated.
3) Processes being used to go from requirements elicitation to acceptance are not shifting dramatically for the new piece of work.
You have to have probably 2 of these 3 to have any chance of reasonably accurate estimates. I've seen this work on a fairly large (1 MLOC C++) sonar system development. After a couple of 'late' releases, where those 3 premises were not true, estimation became better, and after 3 or 4 releases, teams were getting pretty accurate, such that customer trust went through the roof.
If you don't have 2 or 3 of those ticked off, you'd better add in a bunch of padding, or get some risk $$ from the C-suite signed off.
I have been involved in 2 medium sized-ish (~300) software support projects for western-nation's land forces project that brought in SAFe with a fanfare. Lots of ($$) training, everybody gulping down the coolade etc etc. It started off OK, but as with most of these ideological methodologies, our projects' circumstances started to clash with the SAFe 'way'. Our customer was very fond of his existing rituals (meetings, committees, progress meetings etc), but we also folded in all the SAFe rituals too. It seemed we were in meetings too much of the time, and we did a poor job of convincing the customer to move wholesale to the SAFe way. In addition, the organizational structure and governance models never operated in the SAFe way, with the customer's insistence on being in our shorts on every decision hampered most of the 'delegate decisions as deep as possible' philosophy. At the end of the day, it steel feels like RUP re-invented for 'agile' .. never again.
I was backpacking around Asia in '94 .. my connection to the rest of the world was my trusty Sony shortwave radio (ICF-SW1) .. anyone else remember those glorious days ? :)
