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Accurate estimates are impossible, but you can get better at them. Getting better at them mostly entails increasing your estimate to the point that it feels abs
by danenania 3y ago
Accurate estimates are impossible, but you can get better at them. Getting better at them mostly entails increasing your estimate to the point that it feels absurd, and then doubling it. To become a true expert, double it again. Another approach is to always bump it up a unit of time. So an hour becomes a day, a day a week, a week a month, a month a quarter, etc.
Really, you just have to be a pessimist. Instead of saying what people want to hear (it's simple and can be implemented quickly), you need to imagine the long-tail worst-case scenario where everything that can possibly go wrong goes wrong, then give that number. If people don't give you a somewhat incredulous look when you give an estimate, you probably were too optimistic. Just remind them that you're imagining a worst-case scenario and say that you hope to have it done sooner, but don't back down on your estimate.
Another thing to realize: at the business level, deadlines are often picked arbitrarily to create urgency. The specific date of the deadline is usually less important than just having some deadline, any deadline, to motivate everyone. Business people will pretend the deadline is Very Important, but it's all an act, more or less (arguably it's a necessary one). Remember this when giving your estimates.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago> Accurate estimates are impossible disagree, not all tasks can be estimated accurately depending on circumstances but this does not imply that it's impossible to estimate any task accurately.
- danenania 3y agoNo matter what the task is, things can go wrong that you didn’t anticipate. Maybe it’s just a quick CSS change, but all of a sudden the webpack build starts mysteriously failing. And now your node_modules got corrupted and oops, when you delete it and reinstall dependencies, there’s a dependency conflict. Once you’ve finally gotten that figured out, some tests are now failing in part of the codebase you’ve never seen before. Better make some coffee… Some version of this can always happen, and as a task gets larger, it is almost guaranteed to happen multiple times in multiple variations. Since you don’t know what problems will arise, there is no way to know how long it will take you to fix them. You can stay up all night in order to pretend that your “quick and easy” estimate was accurate, but that only takes you so far.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoyeah, and maybe I'll have a heart attack and die while going to take a piss but that doesn't imply it's impossible to accurately estimate that it's going to take 5 minutes for said piss. What if, while cooking dinner, a meteor crashes in my kitchen and so my estimate of 30 minutes to cook dinner turns out to be incorrect? That _obviously_ means the conclusion is that it's impossible to accurately estimate how long it takes to cook that dish so we should never do so. There has to be a name for the type of reply your post represents.
- danenania 3y agoHaha yes, webpack breaking or a test failing is equivalent to having a heart attack or a meteor hitting your kitchen.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoif your webpack or ci/cd pipeline is breaking often enough that you worry about it when delivering estimates, that's a you problem.
- danenania 3y agoAre free ponies available in this magical land you speak of where nothing ever unexpectedly breaks? Please put me down for two.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoyou mean the same world where no one has heart attacks and meteors have never hit houses? Both have been documented to have happened, yet somehow you didn't seem to think that should be taken into account when considering estimates for cooking and pissing. If your shit is breaking so often you're afraid to give an estimate, that's a you problem. And yes, we had an internal team that w/i the last 6 months couldn't go a week without a deployment problem. Ask me why they no longer have that issue.
- NoGravitas 3y ago[Managers] are like children. They want everything right now, and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want. — Montgomery Scott