Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by altitudinous 1778 days ago
Once you've been around in this software business for long enough you see the same articles written over and over again... there will always be articles about estimating software, yet there is no solution to this problem.

Anyhow, it doesn't matter. Software devs are the lowest cog, they don't get to extend the delivery date. All the layers above - management, marketing, sales etc need a date to work to to deliver their work, and they generate the $$$. No-one cares if the software is low quality, as long as it is delivered. Dev team can do further updates to bug fix after delivery. The end.
4 comments
quickthrower2 1778 days ago
No one gets to choose the delivery date, other than actual reality. Anything before that is a prediction. The question is how good is your predictive model and do people understand the error margins. In my experience high ups like to promise dates (in general). But it’s a dance: everyone knows it’ll be later because “IT project”

It takes a lot of trust and maturity and skill (from both technical and business side) to have continual value delivery instead of estimates. This is possible but not the common case.

link
sumtechguy 1778 days ago
It is what we seem to call the 'unknown unknown'. Basically something popped up that was not planned for and now you need to research/fix/qa and shove that in. Even our 'known' bits are always underestimated. Because many people are hopeful and willing to 'try harder'.

Heck I personally just did this. I scoped out a story. Then realized I had underestimated it because there was at least 2 tech stacks in the thing I had not used much. So I had to basically drop what I was going to do and figure out some PoC on that. THEN I could write my code.

link
zug_zug 1778 days ago
Yeah, if I could go back in time I'd tell myself "Software has always been late, it's always going to be late, you can work yourself extra-hard to make it less late, but it's not YOUR PROBLEM. You can compensate for the malfunction of the organization but you won't be thanked, you won't learn as much by hacking, and it almost never matters anyways because the startup either will get traction or it won't, it never fails by a margin of 5%"
link
taneq 1777 days ago
> Once you've been around in this software business for long enough you see the same articles written over and over again

My favourite is watching successive generations discover thin client vs. fat client over and over again.

link