Jon Pretty

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.

I have three measure: 1/ done before tomorrow ; 2/ looks like something I already did in less than a week, so something like that ; 3/ not the least idea, do you want that we play dices together to fill your columns?

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 :)

Software development is one of the only professions where we are asked to accurately state how long it will take us to do something that has never been done before in the history of the universe.

Uh... I’m pretty sure most software development work is not so unique. This seems remarkably self-aggrandizing, especially in comparison to all of the other actual engineering disciplines that seem to get along fairly well in comparison to our seemingly endless ineptitude.

well, no, but the reverse hold. Look at iter, or even the f-35 if you want something already done, just a new version with changing use case. Of course there's a lot of things that can be accurately estimated in software. But not what is typically expected to be