4 ms·
When you think you're almost done, you're halfway there. However long you expect X to take, you should double that. Hofstadter's Law: it always takes longer th
by e1g 3y ago
When you think you're almost done, you're halfway there. However long you expect X to take, you should double that.
Hofstadter's Law: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
- hananova 3y agoHofstadter's Law implies that every task takes an infinite amount of time.
- bayindirh 3y agoSoftware is a kind of art. It's never finished, but abandoned. You can continue to polish the code without adding functions (or even fixing bugs), so yes, it can take forever. OTOH, when you give that ~180%, you reach to a maturity level most of your users perceive as "done", so what's most developers are after is that point. Then, there are passion projects, which go on for 30+ years (Vim, BBEdit, etc.), where people work on it because they love the project and they're able to. *: BBEdit is closed source/commercial software, but it sells because it's well crafted. It's not crafted to sell well.
- m3047 3y agoIt makes a lot more sense when you understand two things: 1) Untrained software engineers' unconscious inclination is to estimate the amount of time after which it's probably time to reassess, rather than complete. 2) The distribution of actual completion is not a normal distribution with respect to estimates of completion, it is log normal: there's a really really long tail.