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318 points alexzeitler | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.432s | source
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redleggedfrog ◴[] No.42188611[source]
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.

So when those times have occurred I've (we've more accurately) adopted what I refer to the "deer in the headlights" response to just about anything non-trivial. "Hoo boy, that could be doozy. I think someone on the team needs to take an hour or so and figure out what this is really going to take." Then you'll get asked to "ballpark it" because that's what managers do, and they get a number that makes them rise up in their chair, and yes, that is the number they remember. And then you do your hour of due diligence, and try your best not to actually give any other number than the ballpark at any time, and then you get it done "ahead of time" and look good.

Now, I've had good managers who totally didn't need this strategy, and I loved 'em to death. But for the other numbnuts who can't be bothered to learn their career skills, they get the whites of my eyes.

Also, just made meetings a lot more fun.

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aoeusnth1 ◴[] No.42189183[source]
In my experience, super large estimates don’t make you look good in the long run, they make you look incompetent. The engineers who are most likely to be under-performers are also those who give super inflated estimates for simple tasks.

Maybe this is a good strategy for dealing with people who aren’t going to judge you for delivering slowly, or for managers who don’t know what the fuck is going on. For managers who do, they will see right through this.

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eminent101 ◴[] No.42189233[source]
So many bold claims in this comment and little to no justification.

For what it's worth I've seen pretty much the opposite. I don't know about competent vs. incompetent engineers. But when it comes to experience, I've seen the inexperienced ones giving super low estimates and the experienced people giving larger estimates.

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1. taurath ◴[] No.42189423[source]
A big problem when you're a more experienced engineer is when you have your hands in a lot of things and know the relative priority of stuff and how likely it is that something else of importance will pop up. So you anticipate things getting sidetracked over time, and try to make a bit of a longer estimate, usually to give yourself the slack to do other important things without looking like you're falling behind in JIRA.

Giving an "if I had nothing else going on" estimate can be a big trap to fall into - they will only see the number and judge your performance based on that. This dovetails into the problem that untracked but still important work being thankless in low trust environments - not all work can ever be tracked, or else the time to track that work would take as long as doing the work. Examples: literally any emotional labor, time to monitor, time to train, time to document when its not explicitly required, time to solve little problems.

In the environment where none of this counts because its not quantifiable, everyone with knowledge makes themselves into a silo in order to protect perceptions of their performance, and everyone else suffers. I'll go even a little further to say that companies that attempt to have no untracked work are by nature far more sociopathic - thus far there's basically no consequences for sociopathic organizations but I hope one day there will be.