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When did estimates turn into deadlines?

(domainanalysis.io)
318 points alexzeitler | 3 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:03 UTC | HN request time: 1.37s | source
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redleggedfrog ◴[19 Nov 24 22:06 UTC] 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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1. groby_b ◴[20 Nov 24 04:25 UTC] No.42190818[source]▶
One way to get the point across is by stopping to pretend estimates are precise.

Instead of giving a single fixed estimate, give one with error bars. "3 months, plus minus 4 weeks". Most engineers know their estimates have error bars, but have somehow been bludgeoned into forgetting to mention them.

It's also helpful from the management side - the size of the error bars makes it immediately clear how confident folks are in the estimate. It allows reasoning about risk. It allows things like "OK, currently we have 30% error bars either way - what are the biggest contributors to that? Can we knock one or two of those out when we spend a few days investigating?"

It's beyond me why we, as a supposed engineering profession, are unable to talk about risk, probabilities, and confidence intervals. And that isn't just on managers.

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2. smegger001 ◴[20 Nov 24 05:23 UTC] No.42191037[source]▶
>It's beyond me why we, as a supposed engineering profession, are unable to talk about risk, probabilities, and confidence intervals. And that isn't just on managers.

Because management quits listening after hearing "3 months," and bad management heard "3 months minus three weeks" and goes "okay 2 months it is".

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3. groby_b ◴[20 Nov 24 23:29 UTC] No.42199245[source]▶
Outside of cartoons and a couple of rather bad environments, that's just plain made up nonsense.

Management in most places is rather interested in getting planning right, not making up numbers and then failing at achieving them. They often lack the training to get it right (both because we have non-engineers as managers, and because we give shit management training to the engineers that become managers), but "management quits listening" is just an excuse.

I'm in this thing for ~4 decades now, at a good number of companies of all sizes (3-200,000) and I've seen the "not listening and insisting on made up numbers" exactly once. I see however a lot of engineers refuse to even attempt to make reasonable estimates.