Theory: Engineers are never “done” getting better at time estimation. As soon as you get “better”, you’re asked to estimate bigger, more complex, more ambiguous projects, and you have to level up all over again.
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for compsci, a professor told us that it was absurd to ask estimates to dev: our work is by essence to automate things. Either the thing is already automated, and you don't need an estimate anymore. Or it's a new thing to automate, and you don't know yet how it can be done :)
This is an idea I've been trying to promote for years, partly as justification for my inability to estimate well, and partly because I believe it's true. Automation makes the familiar trivially and quickly repeatable, and what work remains to be done is completely unknown.
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The curse of developers. Not only are you expected do do things you've never done before, you're also supposed to know how long it's gonna take.
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appart for the "rolling dices" above, I *really* like the hill metaphor from "shape up" (
@dhh & Co) https://basecamp.com/shapeup/3.4-chapter-12#work-is-like-a-hill …
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But that's why an estimation is an estimation. You can improve estimations based on similar tasks you've done before, they'll gradually become better over time, even if never perfect. What is clearly wrong is understanding those as deadlines imho.
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well, the fact is that anything moderately complex got so many unknowns (from specific constrains to new tech to adversarial context to etc) that estimation is just a fool's game that can (in the best case) help you sketch the landscape. It's worthy! But not an estimate
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Slight dissent from me. Perhaps I'm naive, but I suspect this attitude is only tenable because our industry is relatively young. *Many* apps reimplement the same functionality, in spite of OSS. Meanwhile, we discredit the novelty/ingenuity required in traditional engineering.
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I think my statement took the examples to the extremes by suggesting that tasks that have been done before could be done instantaneously, whereas tasks that are new are completely inestimable. The reality is surely more of a continuum.
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