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> That estimate turned out to be wildly incorrect. The project ended up taking a year longer than I’d originally projected. The reasons are complex; the short v
by shubhamjain 3y ago
> That estimate turned out to be wildly incorrect. The project ended up taking a year longer than I’d originally projected. The reasons are complex; the short version is that I made some major technical assumptions that turned out to be wildly incorrect. Several large architectural changes I’d thought we could avoid turned out to be unavoidable, adding all sorts of dependencies and additional work to the project.
Honestly, I can't help but judge either the company or the author. What kind of project ends up taking more than a year to complete? Wait... it's "a year longer than I’d originally projected." So what was the original estimate? Six months? It doesn't matter how complex it was. If it is taking that long, the project should have been a smaller piece of what was planned.
The author talks about re-estimating, communicating early, and owning up to your mistakes, which is all fine advice, but what if the project itself was too ambitious, and too broad to have a reasonable estimate?
- nradov 3y agoI think some HN users have only ever worked on web or mobile software and have no concept of what happens in the broader software industry. For example, on the F-35 (JSF) program they took about 10 years to ship the first real production release with multiple large schedule slips along the way. And that was despite deferring a lot of the planned scope.
- shubhamjain 3y agoThere is a difference in a "project" in your example and a "project" within a company (usually of a smaller scope and up for modifications). My opinion is that estimates are bound to be missed when there is so much scope for unknown variables creeping in.
- hallway_monitor 3y agoAgree, working in an enterprise where you need to integrate with many existing systems, conform to guidance etc is a different beast than startup code written by a single team. If you haven't worked in an enterprise it's difficult to understand why things take so long.
- nottorp 3y agoYou don't need to go to that extreme. I've whipped up a complete (extremely simple) mobile app in 3 days. Normally i do complex solutions that start with custom hardware/os, possibly include servers... ... for those, only the initial hardware bringup and OS setup may take months.
- simonw 3y ago"Honestly, I can't help but judge either the company or the author." Jacob includes that story under the heading "Don’t do what I did".