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by ngngngng 2198 days ago
You've made similar comments throughout this thread. You don't seem to realize that "novel" does not have to mean universally novel. It could be something novel for the individual.

Recently I had one of these "boring" tasks at work. Set up simple CRUD API and hook it up to graphql for the front end to consume. Only the graphql server was implemented in the most strange way I'd ever seen, so figuring that out took longer than I thought it would, oh and devops had completely uprooted the way we connect to databases to increase our security.

The company is far from the last agile company I've ever worked at, but on large, complex teams, what I'm describing is incredibly common. You don't know what you don't know.
1 comments
dpenguin 2198 days ago
It only means you didn’t do your homework(no offense, everyone falls into this trap too and conclude the issue is that estimation itself is not possible ). You can’t give an estimate based on what the task would take at your previous job.

You need to call out what you don’t know(Now, don’t give me Rumsfeld wisdom.. Most software is not that complicated)

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travisjungroth 2198 days ago
The homework is the job. You can only know how long it will take if you know what you’re going to do. And if you know what you’re going to do, why not just go do it? Just typing out the code doesn’t take that long.
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dpenguin 2198 days ago
It could be because you are working on a brand new area every single “Sprint “(or equivalent). That’s not prudent assignment of resources(the manager should know this).

I have worked in companies where ownership is somewhat static(same few folks work on a given area of the product) and things get done within 10% of estimates (a lot of innovation too).

I have also worked in terms where ownership is fluid and “resources” get assigned to tasks. Nothing is now “estimatable”. Your experience is probably in line with the latter.

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benhurmarcel 2198 days ago
> things get done within 10% of estimates

You can easily do that by estimating very wide and delaying the deliverables until the planned date.

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dpenguin 2198 days ago
That’s cheating. No, that’s not what happened in that org though.
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