When did estimates turn into deadlines?

> I've gone through times when management would treat estimates as deadlines, and were deaf to any sort of reason about why it could be otherwise, like the usual thing of them changing the specification repeatedly.

I worked at a place where this management insanity was endemic, which lead to everyone padding all estimates with enough contingency to account for that. Which lad to the design team, and the front-end team, and the backend team, and the QA team, all padding out their estimates by 150 or 200% - to avoid the blame storms they'd seen for missing "deadlines".

Then the Project managers added those all ups and added 150 - 200%. Then the account managers and sales teams added 150 - 200% to the estimated costs before adding margins and setting prices.

Which ended up in literally around 1 million dollars a month to maintain a website which could _easily_ have been handled by a full time team of 8 or 10 decent web and full stack devs. Hell, apart from the 24x7 support requirement, I reckon I know a few great Rails or Django devs who could have done all the work on their own, perhaps with a part time of contracted graphic designer.

That all lasted a handful of years, until the client worked out what was going on, and my company management flew the whole thing into the mountain, with ~100 people losing their jobs and their owed entitlements (I was out about $26K that day.)

This is literally the endgame.

And the only cure is instead building a company that's tolerant of mistakes while still aspiring to excellence.

The one I've worked at which got the closest had a corporate culture that failures were atrributable to processes, while successes were atrributable to individuals/teams.

Of course that had its own negative side effects, but on the whole it made the company a lot more honest with itself. And consequently got better work out of everyone.

Just curious if the processes got tuned/adjusted as a result? And what were the negative side effects?

Absolutely! That was one of the common productive outcomes: this policy / approach is screwed up, and we could do it better.

Negative side effects were about what you'd imagine. Some low performers unjustly shielded themselves. Safeguards were overbuilt as proof "something" was changed to prevent a failure repeat. Executive promotion criteria could get squirrelly. Etc.

But on the whole, I think the individual/team productivity boost and agility created by honesty was a huge net win.

That is probably analogous to what happens in the American healthcare sector with physicians/hospitals/insurance carriers/pharma/etc. Each one padding their bills making it horrendously expensive for everyone at the end of the chain.

The padding in healthcare is part of the system. One part is to have high prices so insurance can negotiate them down. And for hospitals in particular, prices are padded to subsidize emergency care for the indigent (which they have to provide without regard to ability to pay; thanks Reagan).

How can you not be grateful for that? You don't have money, so you should die? Is that really what you mean?

Yeah, it would certainly be cheaper if those uppity poors just died instead.

Did... did you just chide Reagan because his healthcare policy was not sociopathic enough? I'll admit, that's new. Impressive.

> One part is to have high prices so insurance can negotiate them down.

One basic truism in business is that "Everybody wants a discount".

To shift the focus from blame to improvement is critical for fostering innovation

How about government is paying for treatment of people too poor to pay themselves and everyone is paying their share to finance that spending? And as a bonus everyone else will also get their medical treatment financed this way?

That's a hyperbolic misstatement of the situation on the ground. Poor people use free emergency rooms as primary care instead of paying for primary care physicians. That's a cost disaster no matter what you think should be done about health care. We'd be much better off with actually free primary care for the poor, and it would at least make sense to prevent the emergency room misuse since it's so wasteful. But it's politically untenable in the US to fix a broken system in any direction people don't like, even when it's Pareto optimal.

The first time I'd seen a blameless post mortem, I thought it was a load of bs, as another organization had just caused the first significant production outage our app had ever had. Convenient... no blame. We went along with the process and it did not take very long to understand how this changed the culture. If someone horked a step on a manual deploy, the real question is why is this not automated. People stopped hiding mistakes - so the old snipe hunts where information to trouble shoot might 'disappear' faded and made it easier to debug and then figure out what could be done better. It helped the business understand that 'running in production' did not mean done.

Ryan, if you are out there reading this - ty.

> padding out their estimates by 150 or 200% - to avoid the blame storms they'd seen for missing "deadlines".

This is good advice, as devs tend to underestimate.

This is the story in Canada as well, but way more than the very poor, because there are not enough primary care physicians where needed, and not enough people pursue family medicine. Why would you? What med student looks at the prospect of administering a dinky small business on top of actually practicing medicine, pay well but not great, and have zero equity when they retire? So we land in a similar position because the change might be publicly funded group practices instead of pay per service which has better optics.

Wouldn’t a hybrid system make more sense?

To only assign blame to people/teams when they’ve guaranteed in writing that it would be so and so, avoiding the downsides.

And blaming the process when there were no such guarantees?

Yeah it seems partial privatization is inevitable or at least the default outcome, at least in Ontario. No other way out that’s also politically viable to enact.

The issue with any hybrid system is you have to play the incentives out at scale.

E.g. if blame is assigned when there's a written guarantee, why would anyone ever make a written guarantee?

And not trying to be obtuse, but I've only ever seen blameless cultures work in absolute. Compromises let back in all the nasty mal-incentives you see driving unproductive CYA behaviors.

100%. It was an eye opening experience. Felt somewhat akin to running an RCA on "Why do people hide mistakes?" Well, because it's in their self interest to do so!

See "We've got you covered" for an analysis of reallocating current US healthcare spending into a general healthcare program that aligns with your thinking.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690632/weve-got-you...

E.g. Some people with lower amounts of credibility will be eager to make guarantees in writing, if they want to sound more convincing than someone with higher credibility who disagrees.

Something like a new engineer disagreeing with a PM, a PM disagreeing with higher management, etc…

There’s many reasons why that would be a favourable choice.

was this a company based out of Portland by chance? sounds like my last employer