[Geminidog]

People in general are terrible at predicting the future... I don't think being clairvoyant is a quality that should be expected out of an engineer or anybody.

This whole time estimation thing is akin to predicting when the next hurricane or earthquake will occur. The main problem is business people don't understand that so they place this unrealistic burden on engineers.

A manager or business guy who needs constant and very accurate time predictions is a sign of a bad manager that is overly reliant on engineers and lacks understanding of software. A good manager should have the technical knowledge to make a technical guesstimate himself (that will also likely be wrong) and have the foresight to be able to manage delays and allow for buffer time.

A great team of people creating a product consists of both great Technical product managers and great software engineers. A rockstar software Engineer alone may not have the ability to manage the politics of unrealistic expectations.

[username90]

> This whole time estimation thing is akin to predicting when the next hurricane or earthquake will occur.

This myth needs to die. Can you predict if an item will take closer to a month or a decade? If true then it is far easier to predict than hurricanes or earthquakes. You might not make predictions as accurate as management wants all the time, but most can predict how long things will take within a factor of 3x or so and it will be within that margin most of the time, a person who could do that for hurricanes or earthquakes would be the greatest genius in history.

And yes as you get more skilled your predictions will become more accurate. Hence accurate predictions being a sign of skill.

[Geminidog]

>This myth needs to die.

Let me spell it out in an example. Sports. Horse racing or basketball. You have a team of highly skilled players with a bunch of information quantized, including height, weight, score statistics, rebound statistics, biography... etc. And these guys are in a game with a very very controlled set of rules under exactly the same time pressure and everyone still fails to predict the outcome.

In software you have a product. The product is usually not concretely defined and you have a complex code base and you can never be 100% sure exactly how the new product will integrate with that code base... you're also not 100% sure how the code will be put together to define the product. Additionally are you 100% familiar with the stack? Do you know every possible primitive of psql or ruby or python or C++ that you could be using to create your project because I pretty much guarantee you every basketball player more or less knows every possible move and rule of a basketball game.

You're also working with a team that includes people that you have much less information on than normal. You worked with a guy for what at most two years does that give you accurate statistical information to the degree of say a basketball player? Also there's bound to be people you're less familiar with working on the project as well. Are you interacting with other teams as well? Does the outcome of your project hinge on the completion of a feature by an entire team outside of your own?

People can be experts on horse races or sports. Even then they can't predict things accurately. If you were to start making bets on software development dates of completion. You will also massively fail because not only are there more variables in a software project... but you have much less information.

Chaos is a phenomenon that happens to systems we have close to perfect information for. We find that if we have the perfect information of all the particles in a weather system except for say one particle. We find that information about that missing particle will make our mathematical calculation wildly inaccurate.

For software we don't even have anything close to perfect information in a system with multitudes of variables. Chaos will throw any prediction off.

>but most can predict how long things will take within a factor of 3x or so and it will be within that margin most of the time, a person who could do that for hurricanes or earthquakes would be the greatest genius in history.

3x of what. 3x can be big or small depending on x. So if I predict a project will take one year I can be off by 3 years under your logic. If I predict a month, than I can be off by 3 months. If I predict a week, 3 weeks. 3x is pretty horrible if you ask me, it's easy to make guesses within these parameters.

I predict that both a hurricane and an earthquake will happen in a century. I'll only be off by 3x or 3 centuries. Actually I can do better than that. I'm 100% sure multiple earthquakes and multiple hurricanes will happen in the next century and I am 100% sure that I will by 0x off let alone 3x.... Look I'm the greatest genius in history.

3x is not a reasonable margin of error.

[Benjammer]

Thanks for this, I'm going to use the sports analogy in the (near) future the next time I discuss this with anyone.

It's all politics. Estimation is a purely political game by EMs/TPMs/PMs to try and shirk responsibility for engineering outcomes.

Here's another neat tack to try in this conversation. Ask for individual examples of "good estimators," and ask for details about what makes them good estimators. You'll rarely (if ever) hear that someone was so accurate that it materially impacted a project in a positive way. What would that even look like? "I was sooo accurate that the client success people were able to say that our new product would be ready 6 months ago, and now didn't have to send a follow up email to update the timeline!!!" The only answers I've gotten are that people who are good at estimating are the ones where nobody ever really has to look at their schedule and there is no drama because they are always getting things done. This is highly contextual and rarely has to do with that person's individual estimating skill. It has to do with their project, team, EM, PM, experience relative to teammates, etc. Recently I was given an example of a client-side developer who is far more experienced than the back-end guy building his API, so he's always just sitting around waiting for the API to be finished to build his features. He almost always does 3/4 of his tasks ahead of time and then just waits for the API to be done and puts his ticket in as completed at that point. So he's not really estimating at all, and he's not accurate, it's just that the project is bottle-necked on the back-end dev speed regardless, so nobody ever cares about his estimates.

It all just seems so wishy-washy and bullshit. It's just about pushing people to work hard and get more done ("you need to hit your estimates, think of them like commitments!"). Framing this all as somehow single-handedly the engineer's problem is just a sign of someone who doesn't know how to operate a software development team effectively. Estimation is a team effort in scheduling, delegation, planning, and communication.

Why in the world (if not politics) would anyone invent a concept where it punishes someone who over-achieves and chooses to work harder for a short period of time? ("you should try to be more accurate about estimates, even if you have to slow down your work, and over working like this leads straight to burn out, be careful!) It's all just nonsense invented by MBAs who have no actual experience in anything except inane "policy" and "oversight."

Software project estimation is a real thing, but it has nothing to do with one person's ability to predict the future. It's an analytical data methodology far more than an individual, experiential skill.