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I would rather have deadlines than give estimates. A deadline is a clear moment in time when the feature is needed. There's a reason behind it. "We need to be
by aspyct 4y ago
I would rather have deadlines than give estimates.
A deadline is a clear moment in time when the feature is needed. There's a reason behind it. "We need to be ready for event X", "Next billing period is in a week".
Fixed deadlines allow you to negotiate the content of the feature, and make meaningful choices when it comes to the amount of details and edge cases to handle.
Otherwise how are you supposed to estimate something? I can make you the same feature in a week or in a month. It's going to be more polished in a month, of course, but I can squeeze it in a week if needed, with limitations.
Embrace deadlines, you will love them.
- miriam_catira 4y agoThis. Fixed deadlines based on real, immutable events. My current role had flexible deadlines. It makes me crazy. All that allows for as unchecked scope creep. So I can't estimate, because the teams requesting the work refuse to define a project's final state (or are incapable?) and it's often impossible to make arbitrary deadlines because they're not real either. I get almost nothing shipped. And when I do, it's literally $7k over or $6k under!
- UK-AL 4y agoReal hard deadlines aren't that common in real life except in a subset of industries. What people want estimates for is budget reasons. They want to lock down both scope and time. So if you want to start removing edge cases and details you'll often find they don't want to do that either.
- aspyct 4y agoMost of my work, in two very different lines of work, is bound to strict hard deadlines. As I mentioned, those are events, reports to external entities, billing etc... I'd say 75% of my dev work is hard deadlines.
- commandlinefan 4y ago> I would rather have deadlines than give estimates Well, in reality, estimates are deadlines that they want you to feel like you came up with in the first place. You don't have to play that game very many times before you realize that they ask for an estimate, then try to argue the estimate down to whatever they had actually budgeted in the first place - but make it seem like it was your commitment in the first place.
- aspyct 4y agoYep, that's when you start discussing the scope of the feature :)
- commandlinefan 4y agoAh, so you do know how to play this game.
- aspyct 4y agoI've been around reckless salespersons in my early years, yes :D