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Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

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Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#331

Post by bb88 »

redhale wrote: post #315
bb88 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two issues right? 1. Inability to estimate effort. Admittedly an academic issue, and should be taught to all engineers in college. 2. Inability of management to deal with delays due to bad estimation. This might be caused by a "bozo explosion", say, (where inept managers hire more inept people underneath them.) Edited to add: 3. Why do we keep making assumptions that management must be infallible? In any dysf…

I cannot believe how much I love the term "bozo explosion". I see this situation all the time as a consultant, and now I have a fantastic term for it. Thanks for sharing!

I'm a consultant as well. You go through enough companies and you can see how much of a problem this actually is.

As much as I did not particularly care for the management style of Steve Jobs, as far as I know, he was the one that first used the term.

https://guykawasaki.com/what-i-learned-from-steve-jobs/

Edited to add:

This just happened recently. Maybe you'll appreciate it.

15 years ago or so (before the term "technical debt" got widespread usage) management kept asking why we working on so many bugs. The solution was to label them as "enhancements".

Just recently within the past year, I saw the exact same thing happen again.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#332

Post by atoav »

karmelapple wrote: post #322
bb88 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even bad estimates are better than no estimates. No estimate is clearly better. Here's a common story I've seen across multiple companies. 1. Marketing management asks Engineering management how long it takes to do feature X so they know when to launch the online ad campaign. 2. Engineering management then asks potentially good coder how long it will take. Coder replies with a time and "it's just an estimate." 3. E…

What is plan for the worst in a scenario with literally zero estimate? “It may take 0 to 3 years” ? “We literally have no way of knowing?” “Not even a ballpark?” “No.” This is what you’ve proposed with no estimate, and this seems extremely unhelpful towards the goal of helping all groups at least have some idea when certain “next steps” can be accomplished.

I work as a sound mixer for film and estimating how long it will take is always hard, but I never really got a bad reception when I just said: I canlt tell you unless I see the thing.

Hell if you ask a mechanic to fix your car they will also have to check the thing first before deciding how long it is going to take.

This is the professional thing to do: gauge the situation, take tour time to figure out the scale of the thing as long as you need and then give a pessimistic guess with a disclaimer that things can easily get out of hand without anybodies fault if unforseen problems arise.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#333

Post by bb88 »

mbesto wrote: post #320
bb88 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even bad estimates are better than no estimates. No estimate is clearly better. Here's a common story I've seen across multiple companies. 1. Marketing management asks Engineering management how long it takes to do feature X so they know when to launch the online ad campaign. 2. Engineering management then asks potentially good coder how long it will take. Coder replies with a time and "it's just an estimate." 3. E…

> Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Oh dear, have you ever spoken to a finance department before? Here's a common story I've seen across multiple companies[0]. 1. The Finance department alots the marketing department with a $500k budget. 2. Marketing department blows through the $500k budget on the engineering department and has no productive app to speak to. 3. The Finance department goes back to the Marketing…

I'm sorry, but if you're spending $500k or more based upon one engineer's "estimate" (for which you're paying $10k/month) then something is more fucked up in that company than what appears on the surface.

But I agree with you, if the engineering management can't budget and prioritize work to get done, that's a larger issue.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#334

Post by bob33212 »

karmelapple wrote: post #322
bb88 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even bad estimates are better than no estimates. No estimate is clearly better. Here's a common story I've seen across multiple companies. 1. Marketing management asks Engineering management how long it takes to do feature X so they know when to launch the online ad campaign. 2. Engineering management then asks potentially good coder how long it will take. Coder replies with a time and "it's just an estimate." 3. E…

What is plan for the worst in a scenario with literally zero estimate? “It may take 0 to 3 years” ? “We literally have no way of knowing?” “Not even a ballpark?” “No.” This is what you’ve proposed with no estimate, and this seems extremely unhelpful towards the goal of helping all groups at least have some idea when certain “next steps” can be accomplished.

My advice would be to live in the real world. We don't know how long it is going to take. Just like if you go to turn on your car and it doesn't start. Maybe it was a minor issue and the next time you turn the key it will start. Maybe there was a short circuit and the car is totaled. A passenger asking you when you are going to get moving is no help.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#335

Post by james_s_tayler »

gomox wrote: post #288
bb88 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even bad estimates are better than no estimates. No estimate is clearly better. Here's a common story I've seen across multiple companies. 1. Marketing management asks Engineering management how long it takes to do feature X so they know when to launch the online ad campaign. 2. Engineering management then asks potentially good coder how long it will take. Coder replies with a time and "it's just an estimate." 3. E…

Oh come on. Any decent project manager understands the difference between an estimate and a deadline and plans and communicates accordingly. It's not rocket science. Stuff gets shipped on time all the time.

Please don't assume decent project managers. That's how you get in trouble.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#336

Post by mbesto »

bb88 wrote: post #333
mbesto wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Oh dear, have you ever spoken to a finance department before? Here's a common story I've seen across multiple companies[0]. 1. The Finance department alots the marketing department with a $500k budget. 2. Marketing department blows through the $500k budget on the engineering department and has no productive app to speak to. 3. The Finance department goes back to the Marketing…

I'm sorry, but if you're spending $500k or more based upon one engineer's "estimate" (for which you're paying $10k/month) then something is more fucked up in that company than what appears on the surface. But I agree with you, if the engineering management can't budget and prioritize work to get done, that's a larger issue.

> but if you're spending $500k or more based upon one engineer's "estimate" (for which you're paying $10k/month)

The $500k was just a random number I came up with. Budgets wildly vary based on whether they get allocated weekly/quarterly/yearly/etc. And also it's never "one engineer's estimate", it's usually a project manager who works with N number of engineers to come up with an estimate.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#337

Post by Aeolun »

karmelapple wrote: post #322
bb88 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even bad estimates are better than no estimates. No estimate is clearly better. Here's a common story I've seen across multiple companies. 1. Marketing management asks Engineering management how long it takes to do feature X so they know when to launch the online ad campaign. 2. Engineering management then asks potentially good coder how long it will take. Coder replies with a time and "it's just an estimate." 3. E…

What is plan for the worst in a scenario with literally zero estimate? “It may take 0 to 3 years” ? “We literally have no way of knowing?” “Not even a ballpark?” “No.” This is what you’ve proposed with no estimate, and this seems extremely unhelpful towards the goal of helping all groups at least have some idea when certain “next steps” can be accomplished.

In these cases it’s often a matter of ‘give me a week and I’ll tell you’.

Then again, a similar number of times, the only information you get is ‘we need a chat program, can you please estimate how long that will take?’. Which will leave it forever impossible to estimate.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#338

Post by sopooneo »

bob33212 wrote: post #334
karmelapple wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is plan for the worst in a scenario with literally zero estimate? “It may take 0 to 3 years” ? “We literally have no way of knowing?” “Not even a ballpark?” “No.” This is what you’ve proposed with no estimate, and this seems extremely unhelpful towards the goal of helping all groups at least have some idea when certain “next steps” can be accomplished.

My advice would be to live in the real world. We don't know how long it is going to take. Just like if you go to turn on your car and it doesn't start. Maybe it was a minor issue and the next time you turn the key it will start. Maybe there was a short circuit and the car is totaled. A passenger asking you when you are going to get moving is no help.

If your car won’t start, it will take more than a second, but less than a year to fix. That is a bad estimate, but better than no estimate for a space alien that doesn’t know what a car is.

PM’s are space aliens.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#339

Post by Aeolun »

mbesto wrote: post #320
bb88 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even bad estimates are better than no estimates. No estimate is clearly better. Here's a common story I've seen across multiple companies. 1. Marketing management asks Engineering management how long it takes to do feature X so they know when to launch the online ad campaign. 2. Engineering management then asks potentially good coder how long it will take. Coder replies with a time and "it's just an estimate." 3. E…

> Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Oh dear, have you ever spoken to a finance department before? Here's a common story I've seen across multiple companies[0]. 1. The Finance department alots the marketing department with a $500k budget. 2. Marketing department blows through the $500k budget on the engineering department and has no productive app to speak to. 3. The Finance department goes back to the Marketing…

Doesn’t agile presume you have some deliverables every week? At the very least they’d have ‘something’. It might not be fit for purpose, but that should have been fairly visible a ways before they blew through the whole budget.

Unless, you know, there are other systemic issues in the company.

Re: Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)

#340

Post by Aeolun »

bb88 wrote: post #312
bitwize wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any decent project manager who wants to keep their job will acquiesce to people further up in the org chart who want deadlines, not estimates, and who consider the difference between the two to be as fuzzy as it needs to be.

> Any decent project manager who wants to keep their job will acquiesce to people further up in the org chart In my book, that project manager is not "decent". A decent project manager would recognize the situation for what it is and leave.

Then there won’t be any good project managers, as I’m fairly certain most executives do this shit.
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