3 ms·

I agree with a lot of this but I find instant estimated of low accuracy are very useful to me regularly. It's when you actually only need to know if something w

by IanCal 6y ago

I agree with a lot of this but I find instant estimated of low accuracy are very useful to me regularly. It's when you actually only need to know if something will fall within a certain range. For example, I need to reprocess some documents and don't know how many will be affected. The scope of the change means that it can't affect more than a few hundred thousand, and I know I can easily reprocess a few million before it becomes an issue. I can leave the estimate there, even though it's "between one and 500k" because all I really need to answer is "is it under 3M?". Similarly there are cases the other way where I know quickly that the scale means certain approaches aren't possible despite not really knowing what the actual value is. Learning how to identify what questions are important and easy to answer quickly has been something very useful.

melvinroest 6y ago
I agree with this, which is why I found it a good moment to ask a bit more about the discipline itself with regards to this thread. I'm suspecting that more people disagree than they are commenting here as I'm seeing some downvotes. Unfortunately, they're not participating in the discussion as it would be quite interesting to tease out more why this is or isn't a useful skill. Apparently, opinions on the topic are a bit polarized. Personally, another thing I find it useful for is for salary negotiations when you're talking face to face. Simply being able to guestimate a company's revenue, amount of clients, cost and their mindset gives you an idea if a low ball or high ball offer is due to mindset or due to finances. I find in general that estimations of these types are amazingly good for when you really only have a few seconds, or to warrant further inspection. Like you said, if something is orders of magnitude away, then you already know the answer.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  How can you see downvotes? I haven't gotten any and that's all I can see. Taking a stab in the dark here but it might be because YC is mostly software engineers and these kinds of problems rarely fit into the domain. It's a useful skill set, absolutely, but isn't something taught in computer science. On the data science side this has to be used all the time for most problems, but there are not many data scientists or other kinds of analysts on YC, so the kinds who use these tools are more than likely not going to be represented.
  - melvinroest 6y ago
    You see -1 points, and so on. At the moment it's slightly more upvoted, I wish I could actually see all upvotes and downvotes as it'd tell me how controversial my comment is.

by IanCal 6y ago

melvinroest 6y ago

I agree with this, which is why I found it a good moment to ask a bit more about the discipline itself with regards to this thread. I'm suspecting that more people disagree than they are commenting here as I'm seeing some downvotes. Unfortunately, they're not participating in the discussion as it would be quite interesting to tease out more why this is or isn't a useful skill. Apparently, opinions on the topic are a bit polarized. Personally, another thing I find it useful for is for salary negotiations when you're talking face to face. Simply being able to guestimate a company's revenue, amount of clients, cost and their mindset gives you an idea if a low ball or high ball offer is due to mindset or due to finances. I find in general that estimations of these types are amazingly good for when you really only have a few seconds, or to warrant further inspection. Like you said, if something is orders of magnitude away, then you already know the answer.

proverbialbunny 6y ago
How can you see downvotes? I haven't gotten any and that's all I can see. Taking a stab in the dark here but it might be because YC is mostly software engineers and these kinds of problems rarely fit into the domain. It's a useful skill set, absolutely, but isn't something taught in computer science. On the data science side this has to be used all the time for most problems, but there are not many data scientists or other kinds of analysts on YC, so the kinds who use these tools are more than likely not going to be represented.
- melvinroest 6y ago
  You see -1 points, and so on. At the moment it's slightly more upvoted, I wish I could actually see all upvotes and downvotes as it'd tell me how controversial my comment is.