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> My dentist kept me waiting 50 minutes not long ago > Sure she was “busy”, another patient took longer than she expected, blah blah. Imagine if you had to do
by IanCal 11y ago
> My dentist kept me waiting 50 minutes not long ago
> Sure she was “busy”, another patient took longer than she expected, blah blah.
Imagine if you had to do 10 short coding challenges, one after another, without knowing the full scope beforehand and had to say exactly when each one would finish. Now on project 9, your client shouts at you for delivering late because they are your CUSTOMER and you must not take them for granted!
Did she have to stop in the middle of someone else's appointment to deal with you?
Any story that goes "it happened for years without me saying anything then I got angry" would probably have been handled better for everyone if they'd talked about it to start with. Can't wait? Tell them!
Many people might have a spare half an hour and overall everything goes faster if occasionally the last person needs to wait 30 minutes so that typically more people get seen during the day. But no, because you have a requirement you've not specified, everyone else needs to deal with the consequences.
Or tell them when you make the appointment that you will have to be out by a certain time, there's likely to be a better place to be in the schedule.
- edvinbesic 11y agoIf you have been doing 10 short code challenges a day for 15+ years, I would assume you would have enough experience to estimate properly and take into account some margin. He's not saying your not ever allowed to late, ever ever, but that if you are systematically late all the time, then you are doing something wrong.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoSo you know that most take about 10 minutes, but 5-10% take an hour; you just don't know which ones. Now you have two choices: put enough slack in the schedule so that you regularly sit around waiting for the next challenge, or take enough slack out that you regularly start challenges late. No matter what you do, somebody has to regularly wait. Would you pay ~50% more for an assurance that you usually don't have to wait? You might, but most people wouldn't. And if you want an absolute guarantee then it would be a lot more than 50% extra.
- gtf21 11y agoI think that the point was that she had been routinely this late for a decade. At that point it's not something "running over" but rather bad time management/lack of respect for your customers. > Now on project 9, your client shouts at you for delivering late because they are your CUSTOMER and you must not take them for granted! This would only be a reasonable analogy if your late delivery had, literally, kept them waiting unable to otherwise occupy their time.
- barranger 11y agoOn the flip side, if you were a customer and said developer was purposely scheduling unknown length tasks once every 10 minutes, knowing full well that this would happen, how long would you remain a customer?