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"No, it's less effort than that"

(smartguess.is)
388 points replyifuagree | 1 comments | 21 Oct 23 04:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.353s | source
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_rm ◴[21 Oct 23 14:12 UTC] No.37966921[source]▶
It's more Machiavellian than that. What the middleman wants is a heads I win, tails you lose deal.

He wants to present a low number, to encourage whoever he's dealing with on his end to do what he wants, gaining the benefit from that.

So he'll use every technique under the sun to encourage devs to give him a number he likes more, while never making it look like an order or coercion (which would make it his number - spoiling the whole play).

But when it inevitably takes much longer, he can point at the numbers the devs provided and say he was just communicating what they told him, so he's not responsible.

The only language these types understand is for requests for estimates to be "reviewed" to result in them always going up, to send a message.

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1. P_I_Staker ◴[21 Oct 23 19:16 UTC] No.37969715[source]▶
Yeah, this part is getting lost and there's a lot of apologists here. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to create a vision, make a promise, and then say "I did my job, now engineering just has to do theirs"

I'm reminded of a manager that would add features as I was finalizing a release, sometimes hours before without telling me. He would even add features to releases that already happened. In his mind, he seemed to think that he could just attach the features to a release, and bam. it's done!