[mistermann]

> One of those was the variance in each estimate, which is just the Std Dev squared. The numbers were big. No one could stop talking about how big the numbers were. No one knew what a variance was, nor appreciated that it was just the number in the previous column, multiplied by itself.

Just out of curiosity, were any of them interested in learning the answers to these mysteries?

[cpitman]

I spent a while trying to explain the purpose behind the numbers when it came up, but no, it really just kept coming back to the variance numbers being big. Not "why is the estimate for this so uncertain?", but more "Why is this number 100000? That's big".

This was actually not a time estimate. We were estimating the footprint for our production deployment for a very complicated distributed system. Most of the pieces were only in early development and the load model itself was uncertain by orders of magnitude.

It's a situation where statistics is easily applied, if you know statistics. If you don't, you'll never even realize it would have helped and keep saying that math is useless outside of school.