381–388 of 388 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why do you need a baby? > Do you need to grow your own, or could you adopt? > Is it about birth itself? Does it have to be a human baby? > Does the baby need to be related to you? > What if we hire a baby actor? …
That's the best reply to the baby analogy i saw. Thanks.
So it depends on who's saying "no, it's less effort than that".
Often I come to my engineers and say "No, it's less effort than that" because I know "You've never done this before, and you're buffering for the unknown. But actually one part of this can be reused from and you can get this other part from ". I share the context, the engineers go "oh cool", and update the estimate.
And just as often I come to my managers (people and product) and say the opposite - "No, it's more effort than that" because I know what other things the devs are working on that are not visible to the PMs, what scaling cliff they're stopping us from going over, or that the PM's t-shirt size is not including automation, testing, infrastructure, scaling, etc.
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You do need estimates to unlock capital, plan budgets, plan for staffing. And badgering engineers to make their numbers smaller is often the result of engineers bullshitting their numbers, as I mentioned before. Engineering departments aren’t free from the same errors or fallacies or biases or mistakes that other humans make. This is business 101 stuff.
> You do need estimates to unlock capital, plan budgets, plan for staffing. You might need some amount of estimation. You don't need a full schedule of every task, and producing one just in case is immensely wasteful. In my experience engineers are very happy to help answer questions like "should we be hiring more people for this project" when there is a real need and businesspeople trust enough to share that context…
This is not something I'd bet millions of my own or investor's money on. The sooner engineers realize this – that their honesty simply isn't germane to the discussion at hand – the sooner this endless argument ends.
There's plenty of grown-up engineers who get this by the way.
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None of that is how sales works. “Just try harder” is bad advice in basically any context. Everyone in this thread is trying to point out to you that your assumptions about sales are the same as the LoC assumption that equivalently clueless people make about software.
There is a proven relationship between contacts made and sales made. Which is why sales managers constantly push sales staff to be making calls. Sales has been around for way longer than development, the underlying theory for sales is well known. Just like the underlying theory for manufacturing is well known.
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> Not sure what I would do if I didn't have a decent VP! Learn how to actually do your job? It’s always interesting to see toxic positivity painted in such a favorable light. Very glad I don’t work with you.
If you are like most business people I've worked with, you love my complicity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You do need estimates to unlock capital, plan budgets, plan for staffing. You might need some amount of estimation. You don't need a full schedule of every task, and producing one just in case is immensely wasteful. In my experience engineers are very happy to help answer questions like "should we be hiring more people for this project" when there is a real need and businesspeople trust enough to share that context…
> Most engineers are honest to a fault This is not something I'd bet millions of my own or investor's money on. The sooner engineers realize this – that their honesty simply isn't germane to the discussion at hand – the sooner this endless argument ends. There's plenty of grown-up engineers who get this by the way.
Yeah, no. The sooner business people realise that honesty matters and deceit is deceit no matter how much sophistry you surround it with, the sooner the argument ends. There are plenty of grown-up businesspeople who get this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most engineers are honest to a fault This is not something I'd bet millions of my own or investor's money on. The sooner engineers realize this – that their honesty simply isn't germane to the discussion at hand – the sooner this endless argument ends. There's plenty of grown-up engineers who get this by the way.
> The sooner engineers realize this – that their honesty simply isn't germane to the discussion at hand – the sooner this endless argument ends. Yeah, no. The sooner business people realise that honesty matters and deceit is deceit no matter how much sophistry you surround it with, the sooner the argument ends. There are plenty of grown-up businesspeople who get this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The sooner engineers realize this – that their honesty simply isn't germane to the discussion at hand – the sooner this endless argument ends. Yeah, no. The sooner business people realise that honesty matters and deceit is deceit no matter how much sophistry you surround it with, the sooner the argument ends. There are plenty of grown-up businesspeople who get this.
Right, the business people are dishonest and the engineers are honest. Cringeworthy naïveté.
On the whole, yes. You get what you incentivise.
> Cringeworthy naïveté.
Yeah that's exactly what dishonest people tend to call it when they're called out.