“I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
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Re: “I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
#2[deleted]
Re: “I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
#3> "Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law"
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. 20th anniversary ed., 1999, p. 152.
Re: “I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
#4Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Re: “I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
#5> "Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law" - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. 20th anniversary ed., 1999, p. 152. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law
Ha, you beat me to it. Though you quote it wrong. That was the whole sentence in the G.E.B.. Without the quotes.
Re: “I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
#6> "Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law" - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. 20th anniversary ed., 1999, p. 152. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law
Ha, you beat me to it. Though you quote it wrong. That was the whole sentence in the G.E.B.. Without the quotes.
I updated the the quote. Thanks!
Re: “I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
#7> So, what did we learn?
1. If you are coding or writing, multiply the expected time of any specific task by ∼ 1.5x (the real completion time will now probably still be 1.5x longer than your new expected time, but you tried).
1.5x matches my real-world SW dev experience.
Re: “I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
#8it's all fat tails, they're all fat tails, assume correlational structure and whack peeps in the head if they say anything about bell curves
when you play the game of code you play a demonic St. Petersburg martingale. you start with one time period. flip the coin- heads, you finish. tails, you double the time period. at the end of that time period, flip it again: heads, you finish. tails you double the time period again. and so on: the expectation is infinite.
"well, that doesn't sound so bad, really" - there's why bernoulli was scratching his head.
Re: “I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
#9imo, the problem with estimates vs reality is that estimates don't include mental state. And just to clarify more about mental state, I am referring to being in the zone / flow, and individuals are healthy and experience normal stress / happiness levels.
We assume and expect consistent productivity from ourselves. Anecdotally, In my 20 yrs experience, I've never heard a software engineer saying to their manager "add 2 more weeks on top because my mental state is not at its sharpest these days". No SE in their right mind would put themselves in such a vulnerable situation especially when no one else talks about it.
The delays we naively anticipate are the obvious technical related ones and gotchas / cases we might not have considered for the problem.
This is a problem that is prominent in this field and unless I've been missing out on discussions, I've never seen it discussed.
There is a huge productivity difference between people that wake up in the zone vs any other zone. And I've yet to see an SE or any other human that can wake up in the zone every single day. It's impossible. Although this is something we can improve at an individual level by focusing on lowering the std deviation which will help us estimate better and imo it's one of the key factors why some SEs can give more accurate estimates than others assuming they have similar technical skillset.
Each SE deals with this fluctuation / "problem" alone. I've often seen SEs jumping on the management track when the gap between "being in the zone" start to consistently widen. Often after a burnout that never fully recovered.
You wouldn't see this being a problem in careers like HR/Management/Sales. Because an individual can still be somehow productive without being in the zone. But in software engineering, art, writing and the like, it's kind of binary and is very visible.
Re: “I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
#10An important thing I've learnt is that people over-estimate what they can do in a short time whereas they under-estimate what they can do in a long time.
You probably wont finish that feature tonight, and that's OK.
But you will have built something good in a year if you work on it a little bit consistently.