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Ask HN: Are Bad Time Estimates Hurting Software Engineering?
Because the more I think about, the more I think many issues with security/performance/whatever would be made better if managers actually trusted their devs to come up with a reasonable timeframe for their work.
I mean, they already trust most professionals to do their job properly in a reasonable time. You don't see managers yelling at construction workers or lawyers or doctors or chefs to hurry up and get everything done faster. Yet apparently it's fine when done to a dev or designer or marketer or what not.
Would things work better if devs were treated like professionals and left to do the work at their own pace?
- throwaway5752 8y agoBad time estimates hurt anything. But you are not familiar enough with construction, law, medicine, or cooking if you think they don't have the same pressures (if not worse). I would say that most of my experience is managers asking for estimates, and developers giving either estimates that are too optimistic or ones that weren't given enough thought.
- sidlls 8y agoSeems like a chicken and egg problem to me. I ask my developers to give me estimates and then my manager asks me why they're going to take so long (I trust their estimates, my manager is worried about meeting deliverables). There's no way to take that feedback back to the team without it adversely impacting the quality of their estimates going forward. I shield them as best as I can by intercepting requests before it gets to a member of my team, but stuff happens.
- elliekelly 8y agoI'm a lawyer. I was absolutely pressured to draft and review documents faster than I felt comfortable. At a certain point though your reputational risk (and the reputational risk to your company) needs to be considered above anyone standing over you pressuring you to work so fast that quality is sacrificed. I can draft a terrible document as quickly as my boss would like but that doesn't add much value and it's not what I'm being paid to accomplish. Management will always be vocal about time and cost while a project is in-process but management and the end user will be far more vocal once the project is complete if the quality does not meet expectations. The time-quality-cost triad is frustrating when you're stuck in the middle for sure but the best approach is to help management understand the trade-offs so you both can set reasonable expectations. Time is money and all.