5 ms·
> But the interesting bit was each individual task was inaccurate - lots were wildly underestimated, balanced by those which were wildly overestimated. This is
by xondono 5y ago
> But the interesting bit was each individual task was inaccurate - lots were wildly underestimated, balanced by those which were wildly overestimated.
This is called random luck. Something tells me that if we repeated the same experiment with different projects, that distribution of errors wouldn’t cancel out most of the time.
- jmchuster 5y agoNot all the time, but most of the time, yes it cancels out. If you work in a business like consulting, you'll quickly learn that you make more money by being able to give estimates in this manner. And when it's part of your job, it becomes a skill that you need to train and become better at, and your estimates get more consistent and more accurate.
- xondono 5y agoYeah, I’ve done it myself. I’ve given price estimates for complex PCBAs before designing them within 0.5%, but I don’t attribute that precision to talent, I probably get the estimates in the +/-10% and got lucky in that case.
- jmchuster 5y agoAh, sorry, I misread your original statement then. Were you trying to say that getting an estimate right within 2 days was lucky, but something like 1 week would've been totally normal? It's hard to tell the percentage, since OP just said "large project".