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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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.
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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Fair point! And the libraries and tooling you typically produce are probably on the inestimable side of that spectrum
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Haha, maybe! But they're also the sorts of things nobody asked me to write, let alone held me to any sort of schedule...
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I think most experienced programmers have a reasonable feeling for incidental complexity of tasks and can estimate within some non-shocking tolerance. But accidental complexity is a crap shoot and it overwhelms everything else once your system reaches a certain size.
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Like I go to change the oil which should take ten minutes, but when I take the cap off the windows shatter and the wheels turn into squares. At a certain point something like that happens more often than not. I had a 2-week task turn into 18 months once. :shrug:
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