Only half on-topic: Many (non-Windows) desktop environments already provide a function to keep and search previous clipboard content: See for example https://userbase.kde.org/Klipper
“This project will only take 2 hours”
81–90 of 279 posts
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#82Reminds me of how some companies give take-home assignments to job candidates. > Here's a task that takes a day to do sloppily and at least two days for you to show your best work. We want to be respectful of your time so please don't spend more than 2 hours on it.
The take-home assignment seems to me a slightly broken system; it's easily gameable because there's zero supervision.
Let's say there's two candidates for a position who are both asked to complete the take-home assignment, Candidate A and Candidate B.
Candidate A is the superior candidate and spends only two hours on the task (as requested), and Candidate B spends 2 days. Candidate B submits the better assignment and is more likely to land the job as a result, despite Candidate A being the better candidate.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the author gave a project idea where most of the project was figuring out UX concerns of non existing users. It is a horrible project no matter how you view it. If you do UX then you need users to actually test what you write on. If you don't do UX then this project is very easy. Sure these students might not have done it in 4 hours, but not because they would get stuck on whatever the author talked about, but be…
> But the author gave a project idea where most of the project was figuring out UX concerns of non existing users. > If you do UX then you need users to actually test what you write on. No offense to azhenley but why do you expect any different? They asked a CS professor for a project idea. How many CS professors have project ideas that come with UX case-studies? How many CS professors have the resources to guide stu…
Yeah, I think I kind of lost the thread after a few levels here. The original point was that the student estimate wasn't that wrong for a hobby definition of getting a project done.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#84One man's poor estimation is the other's scope creep.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#85When someone says this should be easy... I would like to show them the flow chart for how slack notification works. https://imgur.com/gallery/0p5bV
Just "notify the user"... imagine the amount of code and the number of APIs this needs to touch.
Software is way complex and devil is in the details.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#86A daemon that writes the contents of the clipboard to a log file would be a reasonable utility. It does not need to be pauseable; just kill the process when you don't need it. It doesn't need to only record URLs; just use grep to filter the log file. This is how I would write the thing for my own use.
The professor gave the students incomplete information. What they said is perfectly reasonable. This is a project they will be doing on their own time, so the scope of it is entirely up to them.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone can write a rough command line tool that monitors the clipboard and prints to stdout. There's a good chance that this will solve 95% of all needs. Most of the features suggested in the article beyond the original premise are unnecessary.
Reaching to first 90% is easy. Remaining 90% is the hard part. As the saying goes: The 90% of the project takes 90% of the time. Remaining 10% takes 90% of the time.
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Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#88The poisonous version of this is "This should take no time, I did a POC myself in a day".
Happened when I helped hire a friend to help with a trading project. This friend is simply one of the best coders out there, understands the domain, understands all the coding. The guy who was hiring him threw together a websocket, pulled some data, and thought there's just a tiny bit of work left in the details. He did it in nodejs.
Of course figuring out the details was the hard part, made especially hard by not having a clear request for what the project was going to do. Was perf important? What about all the various features?
It's really something to look out for as a manager. Don't be that guy who says everything is easy.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#89anyone else feeling like lately at work they are spending more time on dialing in time estimates for work than actually doing the work? it feels like we have a problem (at least in sysadmin/devops roles) of valuing time estimates/"the process"/agile over actually banging out some work. i am starting to tune out planning meetings and requests for time estimates with a least effort possible attitude.
I've had this problem before, it's a symptom of management not trusting development teams.
It's worse when combined with the "we say estimates aren't timeframes but secretly they are" problem: give a 3 day estimate for something, and when it's not finished in 3 calendar days (because only around 1/4 of that time was actually usable for work, the rest was pointless meetings or 20 minute gaps where nothing useful can be done), more meetings are scheduled to discuss why the estimates are "wrong".
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#90This post ignores the fact that an answer to questions about development time depends on the technology used, i.e., the tooling, programming language and platform/supported operating systems and, first and foremost, how familiar the developers are with these . I believe the student who said it's going to take them 2 hours. For example, I can guarantee you that I would have been able to finish this project in less tha…
The other thing is, how well researched do you want to be? When I'm learning something new, I usually want to gain a deep understanding and really get to the ins and outs of it.
So when figuring out (for example) how to do X in language Y, I'm not very likely to stop at the first SO answer and call it done, because very often there's more to it (e.g. tradeoffs in performance, compatibility, composability, pitfalls & caveats, etc.). But the difference it makes in time taken can be massive. Maybe finding that first SO answer takes a minute, but gaining a deep understanding can take a few hours of reading and experimenting.
This ends up feeling weird for these take home assignments if you're using a new stack. My normal mode of operation is to gain deep understanding (and people generally consider me insightful, which I attribute to that pursuit of understanding), but this may look bad to someone who already knows the stack and/or thinks that you should just cope & paste.