3 ms·
I'm sure that happens a lot. In my experience, people tend to be bad at estimating things. As a long-time SWE who eventually (also) managed teams: I found est
by timmg 2y ago
I'm sure that happens a lot. In my experience, people tend to be bad at estimating things.
As a long-time SWE who eventually (also) managed teams: I found estimates particularly difficult. Some SWEs would give very optimistic estimates (and always miss). Others would "sandbag" their estimates, because they didn't want to have to explain why they were late.
I tried really hard to make sure the SWEs on my team didn't get "blamed" if they were late and asked them to generally give aggressive estimates. My rationale was that if you estimated more time than it really took, you would tend to fill up that time no matter what.
- claudex 2y agoIt depends what you do with the estimate. If you have to deliver a product/a functionality where X people depends on it to continue. It's best, in the general case, to overestimate a little to not have the X people preparing to work when they can't. If you estimate to schedule the task for the week, it can be more useful to be more aggressive since missing the deadline is less impactful. For example, there are a lot of task that I depends on which can be completed in one week or three month. I don't care which it will be, I just want to know when it will be done so I can schedule other tasks before.
- Viliam1234 2y ago> Some SWEs would give very optimistic estimates (and always miss). This seems to be the easiest case. Keep a spreadsheet with two columns: the time they estimated, and the actual time. Calculate the average coefficient between the columns. Next time they give you an estimate, don't comment on that, just privately multiply it by the coefficient.