Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
91–100 of 102 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#92The 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.…
I think the only thing you missed was that the original estimate also included more FTEs, but then they cut those too. This whole chain of reality was a big part of why I eventually decided I had to get out of tech. The people doing the work can often articulate the work and provide solid estimates to the work, but they will get chewed up by people with other agendas.
Very curious to know how did you get out and what you do for a living now as I’m looking to save myself as well.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why does the size of the work that needs to get done matter? If you need it you need it. Generally, I would agree, but I've seen cases where it mattered, because the value of a feature would become 0 after a set date. For instance, we needed a specific feature to fulfill the requirements for a (massive) contract, and you could only apply for the contract until a specific date. The value of this feature outside this…
> Generally, I would agree, but I've seen cases where it mattered, because the value of a feature would become 0 after a set date. For instance, we needed a specific feature to fulfill the requirements for a (massive) contract As I said, you put it at the top of the backlog and alert the team of a new deadline. You work on it until the deadline. If you make it, great, if not, you move on. Asking for an estimate would…
But not trying something very unlikely to succeed sounds valuable to me. Why waste 2 months of engineering time if your engineering team is convinced it will take at least 6 months?
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#94The 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.…
I think the only thing you missed was that the original estimate also included more FTEs, but then they cut those too. This whole chain of reality was a big part of why I eventually decided I had to get out of tech. The people doing the work can often articulate the work and provide solid estimates to the work, but they will get chewed up by people with other agendas.
Or a variation on the theme: "we know this schedule is aggressive, but we have open reqs to hire another 3 engineers"... who of course never materialize.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#95From my experience it is always the simple 80/20 rule. The last 20% takes around the same time as the original 80% estimate.
1. Break down "project" in small enough Tasks. Measured in days or weeks and not in months. The scale and margin of error tends to be wrong once you are in the months category.
2. Ask your frontlines ( Engineers, Sales or whoever that is doing the actual work ) to do Estimate for 80% of those task. Not their Managers. You should also know their personalities in their numbers. Some give you numbers that are too conservatives, some are too aggressive. And needs to be adjusted accordingly.
The total Add up Estimate for the project will be the time for you to reach 80% of your Goal. This tends to be +/- 20% accuracy.
The remaining 20% will somehow take the same amount of time for your initial 80%. The reason for that is in tech speak, we are very good at measuring and estimating bandwidth, but absolutely appalling at measuring and understanding context switching and latency. The amount of small things are the remaining 20%.
So if the original estimate of 80% is 10 months, the worst case scenario would be 10 months + 20% = 12 Month and doubling that to 24 months. And if you are the top of the line project manager, you should also expect that 24 months to be within +/- 20% accuracy. i.e You should report your number as 28 months to your line of report to save your ass.
I find this rules to be reasonably good. Ignoring catastrophic failure and other external factors. I mean if your whole team quit mid way there is no way your original estimate could factor those in. Remember, estimate are, just guesses. There is absolutely no way to be certain. I think this rule is simple and straight forward enough to be used across any industry.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#96Funnily enough, I just saw this link pop up: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big...
"How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum"
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#97No estimates has the highest potential for improvement. Estimates are often wrong. In many organizations they are reliably wrong. Without spending time on estimates and wondering how to make them accurate, you can:
* Make risk assessments: Which tasks are most likely to cause a schedule problem or where an implementation approach could fail.
* Spend more time on retrospectives. Retrospectives are more valuable than estimates because the data is accurate.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#98The 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.…
I can't stress this enough how accurate this is in my current company.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#99In frameworks like scrum, where estimates are crucial, developers adjust/hack estimation according to their needs.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
#100The 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.…
I think the only thing you missed was that the original estimate also included more FTEs, but then they cut those too. This whole chain of reality was a big part of why I eventually decided I had to get out of tech. The people doing the work can often articulate the work and provide solid estimates to the work, but they will get chewed up by people with other agendas.
Another post also asked but I am interested too: what have you moved on to?