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Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

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Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#11

Post by zoul »

withinboredom wrote: post #4
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #2

> when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes Feels like a very outsized reaction to have to something well-intentioned, useful, and not-ridiculous.

It's quite ridiculous for a number of reasons, well documented by research and experience: software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.

But sorting issues according to their rough size is precisely what makes at least basic sense. A scale of trivial (can make many of those in a day), simple (several of those a day), medium (roughly a day of work) or large (days) makes it possible to have at least basic conversation around work planning. I’m not extra sold about calling those by shirt sizes, but I’m sure we’re on the better end of the absurdity scale here :)

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#12

Post by jnsaff2 »

> when people started coming with so many unrealistic and absurd expectations and demands about what my furniture should do

There, fixed it for you.

People are the same just pay sucks way more.

I wholeheartedly endorse woodworking as a meditative hobby to forget about your day work but as a career path you are going to have some very rude discoveries.

Looking at their projects it's mostly basic carpentry level as well. Fine woodworking, the projects where you can charge five figures for a dining table (and you spend a few months making it full time), needs much more design vision and years of practice. Those 10k hours required to master a skill seem about right.

Been through a burnout 20 years ago, had to take a year off and then discovered that if you place correct boundaries and don't let people mess with you, our trade can be pretty enjoyable.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#13

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

withinboredom wrote: post #4
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #2

> when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes Feels like a very outsized reaction to have to something well-intentioned, useful, and not-ridiculous.

It's quite ridiculous for a number of reasons, well documented by research and experience: software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.

Thanks, but this isn’t my first rodeo. In the future, please more carefully exercise more discretion when whipping out the snark.

> software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.

This is both irrelevant and wrong.

It’s irrelevant because t-shirt sizes, story points, and other abstract measures, are - intentionally - not measures of time. It’s a measure of effort, benchmarked against other units of work. Yes, this can, sometimes, give a vague indication of time. It’s also useful for other reasons, too, like weeding out whether or not everyone is on the same page with regard to what needs to be done in the first place. All of this is explained in literally any primer on the subject.

You’re wrong in saying that software engineers aren’t capable of estimating effort (or even time) with any degree of accuracy. They can. I can tell you that my Python hello world script will take less time and effort than rewriting the Linux kernel. None of the “research” and “experience” that you so confidently refer to says what you think it does. It says that there are big limitations to the degree to which timelines can be estimated. This is entirely true. But there’s nuance to it. You’re so desperate to find a shortcut to being smart on the internet that you’re spreading blatant disinformation in the process.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#14

Post by mavamaarten »

withinboredom wrote: post #3

Supporting software is the hardest job, IMHO. People ask some really dumb stuff -- not out of stupidity, but of ignorance; they just don't know what they are asking. To them, the "why is this broken" is "100% your fault and 100% fixable but you are too lazy to fix it." It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing with if you can help it.

Absolutely. People nag our customer service until they get redirected to us (software engineers). When you finally spend expensive time looking into their issue, finding the root cause on their end, take the time to explain it in detail, more often than not the answer is among the lines of "couldn't be bothered to read your response, it still doesn't work, fix it!".

I love software development. I love building both simple and complex systems. But users often suck, and honestly sometimes even the people you're making software for suck. I just want people to be grateful for what I'm doing and I honestly find that lacking a bit in our field.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#15

Post by withinboredom »

XorNot wrote: post #6
withinboredom wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite ridiculous for a number of reasons, well documented by research and experience: software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.

I've always felt this is because estimation never gets treated as an exercise which might involve actual software engineering. You get handed a task you've never seen before, for a system you've never seen before, and asked "how long would implementing this take?" You never get handed a task which is "write as much of a prototype of a system which would do this, so we can estimate how much more work we think is invol…

It's not just that, but also we tend to estimate in the context of "if I were sitting at a computer working on just this problem, this is how long it would take." The reality is that there are meetings, high priority bugs for unrelated systems, interruptions from the business, coworkers and life, code reviews for other team members, rediscovering what you were doing before being interrupted, etc.

Using time tracking, I was able to discover I only spend 2-3 hours per workday actually programming, the rest was all interruptions and such. Thus I can estimate that one day really equals 3-4 workdays. Then my project manager throws in another 3-4x on top of that to deal with scope creep, rework, bug fixes, etc... and we're usually on-target ~50% of the time.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#16

Post by Scarblac »

withinboredom wrote: post #4
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #2

> when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes Feels like a very outsized reaction to have to something well-intentioned, useful, and not-ridiculous.

It's quite ridiculous for a number of reasons, well documented by research and experience: software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.

But that's exactly why people start using things like t shirt sizes: to emphasise the point it's not a time estimate. It's a rough ordering of relative complexity of different tasks, which is something programmers can do.

Of course, the business still needs time estimates, so someone will somehow attempt to turn them into time estimates. But that can't be helped.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#17

Post by oersted »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #2

> when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes Feels like a very outsized reaction to have to something well-intentioned, useful, and not-ridiculous.

I agree, "T-shirt sizes" sounds absurd and provocative, but XS, S, M, L, XL... is a very sane and simple scale for rough estimates of anything.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#18

Post by anonzzzies »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #8

> software dev as we know it is about to disappear soon Pushing back on this a bit. We see promises and people working on this. But I haven’t seen anything definitive yet, and LLMs have their own existential threats around amount and quality of data. Recent article involving trying to get LLMs to reason about law required very fine task decomposition to get move forward. What we don’t know is whether doing this and t…

Hobbies outside work can still be coding. Code is not the same as it was with LLMs but it’s more effective for work and outside work. The LLMs just help but for me they don’t make coding less enjoyable outside modern web crap that is.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#19

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

rettichschnidi wrote: post #5
withinboredom wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite ridiculous for a number of reasons, well documented by research and experience: software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.

Any recommended readings on the "unable to estimate" claim?

There are no good recommendations because it’s wrong. GP has taken “software estimation is hard and very imprecise” and vastly misrepresented it to try to dunk on someone on the internet.

It’s this sort of disinformation that perpetuates the contingent of software developers that cry bloody murder whenever they’re asked to say if something will take a day or a year.

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