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Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#41

Post by KronisLV »

_6pvr wrote: post #29

Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway. If you're a sales driven/feature factory company, the estimates won't matter anyway as you'll demand to meet your obligations regardless of estimates. If you're a company that plans far in advance, the same is true. You'll demand the work you wanted is done at a given date, again regardless of how difficult it was. At my company, we have a well mai…

> Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway.

Except for when potential clients ask your company: "How much implementing a system to do X would cost?"

If your company attempts to calculate this based on how many people would be needed to cover the scope and what the technical complexity of the implementation would be like, then you need to give an answer as a developer, so that the sales department can do some ballpark calculations and give a response to the clients. Especially when numerous other companies within the industry are also attempting to answer that same question.

The processes and methods vary, of course, some use historical data from other projects, some use methodologies like COCOMO, others don't even ask their technical people and try to squeeze as much money from these potential clients as possible, but in the end, someone somewhere cares about the total time the project could take, ahead of time.

It doesn't matter that it's almost impossible to give accurate estimates due to the nature of development (e.g. an everchanging environment with bunches of different technologies that evolve and die, as opposed to a production line of widgets) and it doesn't matter that these requirements are probably inaccurate, that they will change, that there will be scope creep and numerous other difficulties (various development decisions that will impact the project long term, many restrictions and requirements that are dependent on the environments that the clients have).

In the end, i dislike estimation, clients probably don't care about any of the above and want them anyways, which leads to the development methodologies remaining "agile" in name only and estimates end up being expressed in days rather than an abstract number representation of complexity when compared to other similar tasks in that particular project.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#42

Post by void_mint »

gregmac wrote: post #40
_6pvr wrote: post #29

Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway. If you're a sales driven/feature factory company, the estimates won't matter anyway as you'll demand to meet your obligations regardless of estimates. If you're a company that plans far in advance, the same is true. You'll demand the work you wanted is done at a given date, again regardless of how difficult it was. At my company, we have a well mai…

When prioritizing, it's not always obvious which items are big vs small. How do you provide that feedback to PM during prioritization? Sometimes implementing what should be a simple feature requires a month of refactoring some old technical debt. And sometimes what seems like a very complex feature is actually just a matter of enabling a flag on some third party component you're already using. All is us have likely e…

> When prioritizing, it's not always obvious which items are big vs small.

Why does the size of the work that needs to get done matter? If you need it you need it. If you don't, you don't. If you want a fast fix, note it. Speak in outcomes. "The lowest amount of work possible to get us ________"

> All is us have likely experienced "why is x taking so long??

I wouldn't work with a PM that disrespected me like that.

> Had we known, we wouldn't have done it now!" and/or "we didn't realize y was so simple, otherwise we would have done it months ago and probably won a few more deals!" How do you avoid that?

This isn't prioritization, it's a PM making ill-informed judgements on dev work. Don't have your PMs do that. Product people can define priority, scope, etc. If your PM isn't prioritizing something because they think it takes a long time, they do not understand their role.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#43

Post by dharmab »

aasasd wrote: post #36
nzmsv wrote: post #15

The below is a joke, but sadly it is representative of most teams I have worked on. If it's like anything that most managers do, you have the team come up with estimates, have some meetings to see if you missed anything, discover that you did, then create a schedule, remembering to add slack time for unforeseen interruptions due to people getting sick, customer issues, etc. Then you see that the schedule is too long.…

As a dev who has quite some freedom managing himself, I learned to multiply my own estimates by about 2-2.5. If I had a bad case of managers, I would probably multiply by four.

I personally multiply by 3 for any process which isn't almost entirely automation.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#45

Post by 123pie123 »

whatever you say, caveat it with a risks, constraints and assumptions and put an appropriate dissclaimers in with the estimate eg that this is an approxiamate plan and it will be subject to change etc..

The number of times that I've been tried to be held accountable for guesstimates is just not funny

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#46

Post by void_mint »

KronisLV wrote: post #41
_6pvr wrote: post #29

Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway. If you're a sales driven/feature factory company, the estimates won't matter anyway as you'll demand to meet your obligations regardless of estimates. If you're a company that plans far in advance, the same is true. You'll demand the work you wanted is done at a given date, again regardless of how difficult it was. At my company, we have a well mai…

> Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway. Except for when potential clients ask your company: "How much implementing a system to do X would cost?" If your company attempts to calculate this based on how many people would be needed to cover the scope and what the technical complexity of the implementation would be like, then you need to give an answer as a developer, so that the sales dep…

> Except for when potential clients ask your company: "How much would implementing a system to do X cost?"

And what do estimates provide here, that sales just picking a number doesn't? Estimates are made up numbers. They're estimates.

Also this line that you omitted answers your question more directly:

> If you're a sales driven/feature factory company, the estimates won't matter anyway as you'll demand to meet your obligations regardless of estimates.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#47

Post by gumby »

_6pvr wrote: post #29

Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway. If you're a sales driven/feature factory company, the estimates won't matter anyway as you'll demand to meet your obligations regardless of estimates. If you're a company that plans far in advance, the same is true. You'll demand the work you wanted is done at a given date, again regardless of how difficult it was. At my company, we have a well mai…

> Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway.

This only works for some projects. For example if your MVP or go/no go prototype costs $5MM (which a hardware or life science product easily could) you really need to know if it will be 5 or 10.

I ran a company which always quoted 3X fixed price what we thought the project would really cost, even if things turned out to go wrong. Typically we made the (promised) schedule, and when not (luckily didn’t happen too often) the customer would be able to tell pretty much as soon as we could tell, and together we dealt with it.

But as for the cost: most projects were extremely profitable but sometimes we would lose hundreds of thousands on them. That’s why we charged such a premium: we absorbed the financial risk (not that we ever told the customers our internal cost estimate — none of their business!)

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#48

Post by Narretz »

jph wrote: post #37

Estimates that are most successful, in my experience, leverage four perspectives: realistic (for people who prefer a quick approximation), optimistic-pessimistic (for people who prefer ranges and risks), and equilibristic (for people who leverage critical path and critical chain). The mnemonic is ROPE. https://github.com/SixArm/sixarm_project_management_rope_est... Estimates as work-hours by the person most-likely to…

Did you mean to link here? https://github.com/sixarm/sixarm_project_management_rope_est...

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#49

Post by void_mint »

gumby wrote: post #47
_6pvr wrote: post #29

Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway. If you're a sales driven/feature factory company, the estimates won't matter anyway as you'll demand to meet your obligations regardless of estimates. If you're a company that plans far in advance, the same is true. You'll demand the work you wanted is done at a given date, again regardless of how difficult it was. At my company, we have a well mai…

> Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway. This only works for some projects. For example if your MVP or go/no go prototype costs $5MM (which a hardware or life science product easily could) you really need to know if it will be 5 or 10. I ran a company which always quoted 3X fixed price what we thought the project would really cost, even if things turned out to go wrong. Typically we mad…

Hardware and life science projects usually have more time to research and prepare than the hour of weekly estimation provided by silly agile orgs.

Also, how frequently do hardware and life science projects go far over budget and under scope? Do their estimates matter?

As I said, if you have $5MM, you'll get what you get for $5MM. If you want to spend a boatload of time researching, your estimate might be closer, but that research isn't free.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#50

Post by eikenberry »

gregmac wrote: post #40
_6pvr wrote: post #29

Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway. If you're a sales driven/feature factory company, the estimates won't matter anyway as you'll demand to meet your obligations regardless of estimates. If you're a company that plans far in advance, the same is true. You'll demand the work you wanted is done at a given date, again regardless of how difficult it was. At my company, we have a well mai…

When prioritizing, it's not always obvious which items are big vs small. How do you provide that feedback to PM during prioritization? Sometimes implementing what should be a simple feature requires a month of refactoring some old technical debt. And sometimes what seems like a very complex feature is actually just a matter of enabling a flag on some third party component you're already using. All is us have likely e…

I think that last paragraph has a clue as to the problem and solution. Those questions all are assuming someone other than the devs are responsible for deciding things. If the devs are making those calls, they won't wonder why things are taking so long or what could have been simple. PMs should help act as an intermediary with the customer and convey that domain information to the devs but shouldn't have any real say over the roadmap or features as they don't have the knowledge or experience to make those calls.
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