5 ms·

A one year project is now a two decade project

hrktb 9y ago
Seems about right. A year is an eternity anyway, you shouldn’t start a project with nothing coming out of it before a year, that’s suicide on so many plans.
- user5994461 9y ago
  A software project that takes a year will costs a fortune (salaries are expensive). It will probably have to be maintained and running for the next decades to give enough returns to be worthwhile. So, 1 year is the time the first interns team will work on it, 10 year is the duration before the project is retired. Looks like both estimates were right.
dahart 9y ago
The joke is for hours/days/weeks estimates, not months, years or decades. Hopefully nobody is asking an individual contributor for estimates they expect to be in years. My engineering manager at a games company I worked for told me that "three weeks" was the estimate that really meant they had no idea how long it would take, because the task was too hard to estimate. Anything longer than three weeks could, and did in fact, sometimes take six months.
- jwatte 9y ago
  No it works for years, too.
curun1r 9y ago
That sounds right because it's clear that the 1-year estimate lacks understanding and forethought. If you start a project with that large of a swagged estimate, it mostly won't ever be completed. The only way I'd even consider an estimate that large to have any basis in reality is if it was 1 year, 2 months, 6 days and 4 hours. That would mean the estimate is composed of many smaller estimates for tasks that are much closer to being understood. Large projects can always be broken down into smaller, more well-understood tasks. You can't build something large all at once. Large estimates are just an indication of a lack of discipline in planning because they mean that the project hasn't been decomposed into its constituent tasks. Large estimates are lazy and can only be right out of sheer luck. In the team's I manage, I don't let anyone start a story with an estimate of more than two days.

Seems about right. A year is an eternity anyway, you shouldn’t start a project with nothing coming out of it before a year, that’s suicide on so many plans.

user5994461 9y ago
A software project that takes a year will costs a fortune (salaries are expensive). It will probably have to be maintained and running for the next decades to give enough returns to be worthwhile. So, 1 year is the time the first interns team will work on it, 10 year is the duration before the project is retired. Looks like both estimates were right.

dahart 9y ago

The joke is for hours/days/weeks estimates, not months, years or decades. Hopefully nobody is asking an individual contributor for estimates they expect to be in years. My engineering manager at a games company I worked for told me that "three weeks" was the estimate that really meant they had no idea how long it would take, because the task was too hard to estimate. Anything longer than three weeks could, and did in fact, sometimes take six months.

jwatte 9y ago
No it works for years, too.

curun1r 9y ago

That sounds right because it's clear that the 1-year estimate lacks understanding and forethought. If you start a project with that large of a swagged estimate, it mostly won't ever be completed. The only way I'd even consider an estimate that large to have any basis in reality is if it was 1 year, 2 months, 6 days and 4 hours. That would mean the estimate is composed of many smaller estimates for tasks that are much closer to being understood. Large projects can always be broken down into smaller, more well-understood tasks. You can't build something large all at once. Large estimates are just an indication of a lack of discipline in planning because they mean that the project hasn't been decomposed into its constituent tasks. Large estimates are lazy and can only be right out of sheer luck. In the team's I manage, I don't let anyone start a story with an estimate of more than two days.