Programmer Humor

Just use unix milliseconds

my former manager who wanted projects estimated in minutes.

Sorry, the number buffer overflowed.

I usually say what unit of measurement we're counting in: days, weeks or months. For more detail, more specs are needed.

Sir, I estimate the project will be completed in 135 days and 11 hours.

my former manager who wanted projects estimated in minutes.

That wasn't a manager, that was a demon.

Not if your manager then takes the minimum of your estimate.

I don't work for a while anymore.

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you think, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

The known unknowns and especially the unknown unknowns never get factored into an estimate. People only ever think about the happy path, if everything goes right. But that rarely every happens so estimates are always widely off.

The book How Big Things Get Done describes a much better way to factor in everything without knowing all the unknowns though - Just look a previous similar projects and look how long they took, take the average and bounds then adjust up or down if you have good reason to do so. Your project will very likely take a similar amount of time if your samples are similar in nature to your current task. And the actual time already factors in all the issues and problems encountered and even if you don't hit all the same issues your problems will likely take a similar amount of time. And the more previous examples you have the better these estimates get.

But instead of that we just pluck numbers out of the air and wonder why we never hit them.

A good project manager

A what now?

A typical project manager will get a range, take the lower bound and communicate it as the only relevant number to every other stakeholder. When that inevitably does not work out, all the blame will be passed on to you unfiltered.

Depending on where you work it may or may not be worth giving someone new the benefit of the doubt, but in general it is safer to only ever talk about the upper bound and add some padding.

My teams new hire project manager was even more advanced. When they found out we were working on 5-10 projects at once with no PM, they quit.

We had 3 PMs when I started here, and have been down to 0-1 for 6 months. That 0-1 runs a whole unrelated team, but is technical still a PM.

Dysfunction is fun. The plus side? No one asks me for estimates.

My manager once accused me of overinflating my (granted, very conservative) estimates just to be able to pull off a Scotty and be early in 10% of the time.

You know, maybe we shouldn't be taking estimation advice from a 1980s science fiction movie that amounts to a systematic method of lying.

Yes, I've used it before. Yes, you can hopefully have everything average out in the end. Yes, project managers demand estimates. None of these are good reasons to back up how fundamentally flawed it is.