I spent a while trying to explain the purpose behind the numbers when it came up, but no, it really just kept coming back to the variance numbers being big. Not &quot;why is the estimate for this so uncertain?&quot;, but more &quot;Why is this number 100000? That&#x27;s big&quot;.<p>This was actually not a time estimate. We were estimating the footprint for our production deployment for a very complicated distributed system. Most of the pieces were only in early development and the load model itself was uncertain by orders of magnitude.<p>It&#x27;s a situation where statistics is easily applied, <i>if</i> you know statistics. If you don&#x27;t, you&#x27;ll never even realize it would have helped and keep saying that math is useless outside of school.