[karmelapple]

What is plan for the worst in a scenario with literally zero estimate?

“It may take 0 to 3 years” ?

“We literally have no way of knowing?” “Not even a ballpark?” “No.”

This is what you’ve proposed with no estimate, and this seems extremely unhelpful towards the goal of helping all groups at least have some idea when certain “next steps” can be accomplished.

[atoav]

I work as a sound mixer for film and estimating how long it will take is always hard, but I never really got a bad reception when I just said: I canlt tell you unless I see the thing.

Hell if you ask a mechanic to fix your car they will also have to check the thing first before deciding how long it is going to take.

This is the professional thing to do: gauge the situation, take tour time to figure out the scale of the thing as long as you need and then give a pessimistic guess with a disclaimer that things can easily get out of hand without anybodies fault if unforseen problems arise.

[Traster]

Right, but there's a big difference between "Don't estimate until you've done your due diligence" and "Don't estimate".

It's perfectly reasonable to say "This is a big project, it'll take me a week to know where we stand"- there, you've provided an estimate of the scoping task and promised an estimate in the future as well.

[bob33212]

My advice would be to live in the real world. We don't know how long it is going to take. Just like if you go to turn on your car and it doesn't start. Maybe it was a minor issue and the next time you turn the key it will start. Maybe there was a short circuit and the car is totaled. A passenger asking you when you are going to get moving is no help.

[sopooneo]

If your car won’t start, it will take more than a second, but less than a year to fix. That is a bad estimate, but better than no estimate for a space alien that doesn’t know what a car is.

PM’s are space aliens.

[bb88]

The only tool the space alien's PM has is a deadline. "Do X by this date or else." Because he has no hope for understanding the true problem domain before the project deadline -- just like a space alien can't be expected to learn english in 4 days.

A PM with a deep understanding of the software process, can ask insightful questions, identify and possibly mitigate many of the issues beforehand. So when it gets to the software lackeys, many of the resource/architectural issues may have been solved.

[dragonwriter]

> If your car won’t start, it will take more than a second, but less than a year to fix. That is a bad estimate

It's actually a better estimate than most software estimstes, because it isn't just an expected time but a range that results will usually fall within. It would be better if it included an explicit degree of confidence that th actual result would be in the range, and if it was centered around the average time it would take for events in the class.

[Aeolun]

In these cases it’s often a matter of ‘give me a week and I’ll tell you’.

Then again, a similar number of times, the only information you get is ‘we need a chat program, can you please estimate how long that will take?’. Which will leave it forever impossible to estimate.

[notyourday]

> “We literally have no way of knowing?” “Not even a ballpark?” “No.”

That's when the engineering lead or whoever was giving that as the answer is told that his services are no longer required.