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Stupidest client ever:
I once had a client that requested me a new website, all went well and get paid.
After a month our two, he called and requested a change on basically all pages. I sent him a estimate of 2h, he approved, signed a contract and I've made the changes. He never paid me that changes. After 2 months ignoring my calls and emails I've rollback to the pre-changes website. He called me anything you can think off and that I would be sorry for done that... I was like... WTF??
- Pay me and I'll put the changes online.
He replied:
- you will be sorry. See you in court.
We went to court because of FUCKING 200€...
Court decision? The client was obligated to pay me the 200€ and all the court expenses...22 -
My company is like:
Boss: How long do you estimate to make a universe?
God: 14 billion years.
Boss: You have 7 days. Please reserve 1 for Q&A.7 -
"Can you give me an estimate on how long it will take you to fix this bug?"
"That's like asking how long it will take to find my keys."8 -
Friend: How much do you charge for a website?
Me: Depends, what do you need?
Friend: Just a basic website.
Me: I am going to need more details than that, is it static HTML site? Do you want to be able to add content yourself? Do you have hosting? Do you....
Friend: Dude, just give me a rough estimate.
Me: But...
Friend: It's for a friend, he has an idea for a business.
Me: ...fine...$100 million 👿
//Because making a website is just a push of a button to some people21 -
How it usually goes:
1. Have an idea
2. Do about 3 of those things:
- sketch out a few diagramms of how it would work
- think of a name and buy the url
- estimate what you would have to buy and what it would cost
- make a project folder
- lean back, imagine life after the idea made you rich and famous
- write about 2% of the required code
3. Get distracted or don't have time to work on thr idea
4. Have new idea, repeat from 122 -
My last internship. When acquiring a new project and having to give an estimate the boss/sales guy always went to the programming team first to ask them what the estimate was and then communicated that back to the client(s).
Asked him why he does that because many companies don't:
Well, the programmers are going to write the software so why the hell would *I* be the one who gives the fucking estimates?
Yes that was a good boss.4 -
Me: Optimize a sort & match method in backend because users complain it's a bit slow.
Coworker: These algorithms are both O(n), so they're identical *closes PR*
Me: *start zoom call* "Heeeeeeeeeey Iiiiiiiiiii wouuuuuuuld liiiiiiiiike toooooo diiiiiisscuuuuus thaaaaaaaat puuuuuuulllll reeeeeequuuueeest yooooouuuuu cloooooossseeeed"
Coworker: "wtf are you doing, why are you talking so slow"
Me: "No matter whether I talk fast or slow, the information still reaches you in O(n) time, so why are you complaining"
I fucking hate it when people misunderstand the purpose of (or abuse) big O notation. It's an estimate of how an algorithm SCALES once the set increases in size, in which case you leave out both less significant terms and constant factors.
But those terms and factors are important when you're talking about the DIRECT PERFORMANCE of the algorithm on fixed-size sets, instead of SCALING to larger sets.
1n and 10n are both O(n), but 10x performance on a job that used to take 10 minutes is still significant.19 -
Boss: I need to know how much resources a server would need to serve 20000 users at the same time
Me: Sure, can I see the webapp?
B: There's not one yet
M: Ok, can I see its documentation then?
B: There is none
M: But ot depends on the programming language, libraries used, what kin-
B: It's an e-commerce. Try browsing Amazon and see how much they nees to handle the page requests.
Me: *still processing* wh-
Boss: I have to give an estimate to a client within 30 minutes. Hurry.
So.... Uh... I guess i have to hack Amazon now?7 -
Manager: I just think you are being too negative. Like sometimes other people have opinions too and we should hear them out before saying no.
Me: Well your opinion is the devs shouldn't be able to estimate their own tasks and you should decide on our behalf how long something should take.
You also want to decide what tech stack we use, because you followed a "Hello World" tutorial last night and it worked out for you.
Just because you got a simple webpage up and running in 2 hours doesn't mean all websites take 2 hours with the tech. Were not sitting in the corner laughing that you think its taking us 3 weeks to build this.
I'm not being negative simply because I don't agree with you. I'm not being unreasonable if I say I can do 6 weeks work in 2 weeks. And although it sounds offensive, i'm actually doing you a favour by telling you to get your head out of your ass11 -
Manager: The thing you working on. We need this now! Like end of the week.
Me: Desirability is not do-ability.
Manager: く( ・◇・)ヾ？
Me: I am still in the middle of figuring out how to do things in the first place, so there are some technologies to research and some problems I yet need to solve. I am in no state to just write down my solution. I don't even have enough information to even estimate how long it is going to take. I am getting there. And yes, I can rush things, but need I remind you that you want solid data as a result that actually means something? As this is *why* this whole project was started. We have some old project doing the exact same thing, but whose output we don't trust. I wonder how that came to be. Additionally, this whole project was on hold for months until I took over. So I neither understand nor accept this sudden sense of urgency. And by the way, you recently added manpower to this project. And adding manpower almost always decreases the productivity in the beginning due to on-boarding and communication overhead. Last Monday, I didn't write a single line of code due to that. So no, this week will not do, as I am also on vacation starting on Thursday that was requested and was approved by you at the beginning of the year. See you in January.13 -
Million dollar app/service idea.
Automatically reply to all LinkedIn inmail’s with “I don’t have any experience with that on my profile”.
Even without any NLP I estimate over a 90% success rate.12 -
Manager: How long until the current set of tickets is complete?
Dev: Based on storyboard points it’ll be 1.5 weeks from now
Manager: That’s unacceptable! Let me take a look at the board and see if I can remove some low priority tickets.
*Later that day*
Manager: Oooo I found a bunch of really exciting tickets in the backlog that I forgot about. I’ve added them to the board.
Dev: Did you remove any?
Manager: Huh? Oh right. No, I looked and it all needs to get done.
Dev: With these new tickets added to the board our new estimate is 4 weeks.
Manager: WHAT?!? BUT I SPENT ALL DAY LOOKING FOR EFFICIENCIES!!
Dev: …15 -
Job interview goes really well. Senior Dev 90-100k.
Ok, so for your "test" write up a proposal for a web based bulk email sending system with its own admin panel for building list, tracking emails, and with reporting.
I write up an estimate. Low ball the absolute fuck out of it because I'm trying to get a job. Know a few good libraries I can use to save some time. Figure I can just use sendmail, or PHPMailer, or NodeMailer for the emailing, and DataTables Editor for a simple admin CRUD with reporting. Write the thing up. Tell them they can have it in LAMP or Node.
Come in at 36 hours.
Then these fucking wanks told me they wanted me to actually do the project.
My exact response was:
"I bill $50 an hour, let me know"
They did not let me know.
Young devs, jobless devs, desperate devs. I've seen a fair amount of this. And for the right job I might go as high as maybe 4 - 6 hours of unpaid work for some "programming test". But please be careful. There are those who will try to exploit lack of experience or desperation for free work.15 -
Holy fucking shit.
Why do people always expect you to know absolutely everything the second they ask?!
PM: "Yes yes of course we can do that!!! We've done it a million times, we do it for breakfast HAHAHAHAHA"
ME: "Well not really, we've never implemented a solution like that one, its gonna take some time to figure it out"
PM: "HAAAAHAHAHA HE'S SOO FUNNYY LMAOFUDKSJ DONT WORRY WELL HAVE IT READY FOR TOMMORROW :P".
Holy fuuuck I understand you wanna make the sell but you need to give the costumer a realistic look at things, at least give a reasonable deadline for what he's asking! FFS ASK ME HOW COMPLICATED ARE THE THINGS HES ASKING FOR BEFORE TELLING HIM WHEN THEY'RE GONNA BE READY! MAKE A FUCKING ESTIMATE, WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE A TEAM!
Oh and this rant is gonna happen, dont care if I get fired.This needs to change.3 -
PM asks for an estimate on a bug fix, I say 2 hours, he puts down 4 hours, I finish it in 10 mins. Today was a good day :)10
-
Always multiply your time estimate by Pi (an Irrational number). That way you're guaranteed your estimate will be irrational! (Just like the clients expection :P)3
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A guide to estimations.
1) don’t give an immediate answer. The first “timeframe” you give will be held against you and will result in overtime and working weekends.
2) think of a relevant piece of work and the time that took.
2.1) if it’s something you haven’t done before, add some adequate research time.
3) allow half a day of testing for every day of development.
4) add a day as buffer - this is good for on the fly bug fixes
5) calculate time
6) now give an educated estimate.
7) this should take you 5 seconds to get through mentally.
8) if scope creep occurs: goto:15 -
My boss asked me to do estimates for some tasks.
I did it.
He told me that was too much time.
I told him that those were the estimates taking into account the experience of the team.
He told me the estimates were independent of that.
I asked if an estimate, for the same tasks, for a team of interns should be the same as for a team of seniors.
"Of course they are the same!"
Funny thing is that he even says he supports scrum...9 -
Fucking clueless products owners.
Him: "I want a mobile app - how long"
Me: "Depends, what should it do?"
Him: "Dunno"
Me: "Well what problem should it solve?"
Him: "Dunno"
Me: "Who's it for?"
Him: "Dunno"
Me: "Well I can't help you then!"
Him: "I need an estimate for my business plan"
Me: "OK - put 'eternity' down, and we can work backwards from there"
Jackass7 -
This was at my first internship (was fired later for other bs reasons).
They got me as a programming intern but very soon I felt very conflicted with multiple things:
1. Got to google translate their internal CRM into five languages. After two weeks (the estimate I gave them) I discovered that I overlooked the second half, apologized and got a whole shitstorm at my face.
2. Was only allowed to use Internet Explorer for everything *cry face*.
3. Saw multiple security flaws in their main product, told my boss (also my internship manager) about it because hey, I'm security oriented and it might help them. Next day he called me into his office and I got a huge speech about who the fuck I am to criticize their product and that I was a security wannabee who doesn't know shit.
4. Boss came home after a product presentation went sideways. The interns didn't have anything to do with that but he called (or, yelled big time) us every dirty word he could think of and blamed us.
Luckily I was fired after like five weeks. I literally cried of happiness when I walked home. I was too shy to stand up for myself by that time (even only 2-3 years ago)14 -
My company does estimates in two ways.
1. Sales person just throws a number out there, always short, and we panic code to make it happen before the client decides twice as long isn't worth it.
OR
2. The devs are told to give an estimate before having a chance to find out all the requirements, THEN ARE TOLD THEY ESTIMATED TOO HIGH AND TO LOWER THE NUMBER!
FUCK THE ESTIMATING!!! GIVE US TIME AND ACCEPT OUR ESTIMATES!! SALES PEOPLE DONT HAVE TO STAY UP IF WE NEED TO CRAM!!9 -
Finally decided to quit from my current job. Fuck it. They still don't understand that an estimate is an approximation. They still don't understand that I have to fix all the shit made by all the contractors they hire and pay much more than me to implement solutions that work only until they leave the building, something that many barely understand but pretend to be experts in. I quit because of the managers that have no clue about what's happening although I stress them to make changes.
Should I care less about the product an just ship shit? Should I just do my tasks first and stop really helping others but pretend to do so?
Fuck it. I've tried to get it right they want it wrong but in a nice box. I'm an engineer not a fucking magician.12 -
New boss rant here!
Boss: Can you give me an estimate for a new project that we willbe running?
Dev: Oh yes I have already calculated at approximately three months.
Boss: Thats great start on it!
3 months laters....
Boss: Why did it take so much? I feel like our productivity sucks.
Dev:...5 -
fellow from the team was asked to do the estimate by manager - he said 2 weeks
then manager asked what if we add one more developer - he said, again 2 weeks and maybe add day or two
I was asked same question without knowing that they already asked fellow from the team same question - I said around two weeks, maybe day or two more! XD
as manager was confused and not satisfied with the estimates, goes to our team leader with the same questions - team leader said - 2 and half weeks and if you add one more dev to it, 3 weeks minimum
we didn't know that all of us were asked as manager did that behind our backs, in the end manager learned lesson in greed as we got to stick to team leaders estimate!
also that was very rude of underestimating someone's ability, same manager did had personal bias and frequently mocked us, for example when we said that that we will implement ML for cropping images at the right place (ie. crop part of the image where the face is) on the backend. Response was something like: 'You guys will do the ML? Are you shitting me? You're not /insert FANG company/!'
best team win ever!
second best team win ever is when whole team left the company in matter of weeks -
Manager: Give me an estimate for this project.
Me: It will take end to end approx two months.
Manager: Can you do it in a day. Make some magic happen. This is high critical for business.
Me: Sure. I have a small requirement from you to achieve it.
Manager: What
Me: Please get me the 'Limitless' capsule.9 -
Hey PMs!
Fuck you!
Estimates are NOT... I repeat..they are NOT the FUCKING DEADLINES.
If you are asking for an estimate then remember, in your absolutely fucking small fucknugget brain, that it can FUCKING CHANGE!
The last thing you wanna do is grill the dev by asking them to explain in details why the change instead of trusting them. Specially when you don't understand a thing of the technology.
- Dev on whom you are shitting you asshole!18 -
Project Manager: "So that's the feature we need you to add... T-shirt size?"
Me: "Depends what shop I go to, sometimes L, sometimes XL-"
Project Manager: "No, no. T-shirt size... Estimate. Small means hours, Medium means days, Large means weeks."
Me: "Oh... 4 hours."
Wtf.10 -
"How are you going to do that?"
"I don't know..."
"I need an estimate."
"40 hours."
"Why's it going to take that long?"
"I couldn't find the right stack overflow article." -
Generic-IT
--------------
Client:"So we would like to found a new company and offer IT and network consulting. Would you be able to build our website?"
Me:"Absolutely. What will be the name of your company?"
Client:"The name is going to be 'Generic-IT'. The website is going to be 'generic-IT.com' . We checked that with google."
Me:"I am sorry to tell you that generic.com is already taken by another company. Incidentally that company offers the same services, that you intend to offer. They also seem to be quite big an have businesses in 5 different countries.
Because of this I advise you to pick a different name that does not get you into trouble and makes positioning your own brand easier."
Client:"We want to neglect that problem for now."
Me:"0.0 ..... -_-""""
"Well, listen. Apart from the possible branding and copyright problems imagine how people will find you on the web. ...What will happen if you google 'generic IT'?"
Client:"Yeah well, we want to neglect that. And with SEO you can do something about that."
Me:"..........Welllll, you that SEO is not a cure all, right? The older an bigger company will come up first. Why not avoid that missunderstanding and come up with a unique name?"
Client:"......"
Me:"Please tell me. Doesn't any part of my argument make sense to you?"
Client:"..."
Me:"Well, ok. I will send you the estimate on monday."
___________
Then over a back channel I hear that the client is ...bewildered, why I would not stick to my area of expertise.
There I was now. Left bewildered myself, being the one with the webagency that does frontend design and branding.7 -
God virgin media are useless:
Me: “hello how long is left in my contract”
VM: “you have three months left, may I ask why”
Me: “this is now the 3rd day in two weeks I have had no broadband I’m looking to swap to someone more reliable”
VM: “ I’m sorry to hear that I’ll check our system to see what I can do for you”
2 mins on hold
VM: “hello mr day we can offer you a special offer of doubling your internet speed for only £5 a month”
Me: “how does that help with the fact I have no internet”
VM: “well it won’t but we have an engineer looking at the problem and we estimate it will be fixed by 17:05”
Me: “thanks but no thanks, what’s the early exit fee”
😡🤬😡9 -
"I can't work, my new computer is so slow. Please make it faster!"
I can't and won't make your computer faster, because you bought it yourself eventhough you said I should send you an estimate for a new one.
And the fucking software you complain about being slow is none of ours and neither did we install it you crackhead.
By the hammer of Thor, don't ever fucking call me again you shitpiece!
Next time you ask me for an estimate, I will give you my stump two-sided axe through your head while laughing hysterically.1 -
This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...
Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]
Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.
[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]
Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.
May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.
[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]
Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.
[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]
Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.
Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.
On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.6 -
- No I wont give you a ballpark estimate.
- No I wont grab a cup of coffee to discuss your idea
- No I wont check out your existing app/website
I'm a professional and my time is actually what I'm selling. If you want me to spend my time on you then you better spend yours to persuade me.
Send me a brief, your research on competitors, your roadmap, a deck, whatever. I'll probably won't read any of it. But at least I'll now that you you mean business and you value and respect my time.7 -
Manager: We are now using libraries for everything. I estimate based on nothing that this will increase productivity x20.
*Project grinds to a halt while devs scramble to learn/implement new library*
General Manager: Where was the productivity increase?
Manager: Our devs are not willing to learn new things quickly4 -
Today a colleague was making weird noises because he was modifying some data files where half of the data needed to be updated with a name field, there were 4 files all about 1200 lines big.
I asked how he was doing and he said he was ready to kill himself, after he explained why I asked why he was doing if manually. He said he normally uses regex for it but he couldnt do this with a regex.
I opened VS code for him, used the multiselect thing (CTRL+D) and changed one of the files in about 2 minutes. Something he was working on for over half an hour already.... He thanked me about a million times for explaining it to him.
If you ever find yourself in a position where you have a tedious task which takes hours, please ask if somebody knows a way of doing it quicker. Doing something in 2 minutes is quite a bit cheaper and better for your mental state than doing the same thing manually In 3 hours (our estimate)4 -
PM: Can you give me an estimate for this clearly simple task?
Dev: Agreed, it is a simple task. 10 hours.
PM: ??
Dev: 2 hours to implement, 8 hours to discover the GOD FOR SAKEN ISSUE THAT ALWAYS COMES UP ON THESE SEEMINGLY SIMPLE TASKS!! WTF!!! WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN EVERY TIME????1 -
My boss gave me a project without any meaningful requirements and asked:
boss: can you finish this in 9 months?
me: well I really can't give you any estimate.
boss: well just do it.
8 months later I summarize all weekly requirements that the client has given and estimated I should be able to finish the project with just 3 months, if only the requirements are ready and not changing from time to time. What a f***ing waste of my time? Why the f*** people do this? And after all this my boss said:
boss: I think we should be able to finish this project faster.
YOU THINK!4 -
If your manager asks for a "rough time estimate" for a project, there is a higher than 99% chance that your answer will be written down and be used in presentations of project roadmap to upper management and/or marketing, who will create a hard deadline based on your rough estimate and communicate this to customers/clients, and then blame you for not keeping the deadline when it turns out (as it always does) that the rough estimate was off by several months because feature creep caused by upper management.3
-
I quit my job. Today was my last day. Feels so good to get rid of the toxic workplace attitude.
I really wish someday managers understand the difference between an estimate and deadline, will reduce the pressure on devs.
I'm glad that I can take a break and explore what I want to do next 😀12 -
Manager: "We can't have new releases breaking older versions of the mobile app!!!!! We'll lose all our customers!!!!"
fullStackChris: "That's fine, we can do API versioning, but it will take some time to implement, I'll have to be quite careful and write some tests to implement it. Probably 2-3 weeks..."
Manager: "NO WAY, THAT TIME ESTIMATE IS WAY TOO LONG, WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT!!!"
fullStackChris: "So how do you wanna support multiple versions of the app without doing any sort of versioning?"
Manager: "...we'll think of something!"
Dev: "..."
And with 99% certainty, I expect to hear this in a week or two:
Manager: "fullStackChris, we'd like to introduce you to the highly technical concept, API versioning. It's a way to version the API so we can support multiple versions of the application our customers use! It's amazing! Please implement this immediately so we can support multiple versions of the application!"
Sigh... each day managers learn a bit more how physical reality works... you can't have your cake and eat it too.7 -
Typically my low motivation stems from some form of management dickhead-itis, too much red tape or restrictive processes (current place took 3.5 months + 2 forms to order a webcam our client had paid for as part of the project ... it was €45).
How I deal with it? I try to give a go changing it, talking with managers, explaining the issues, suggesting alternatives. Such as removing your head from your ass, when done, it can have a wonderful impact to the team.
When that fails (not if) ... I quit. Which I actually just have. Got a job offer last week, although I really wasn't a fan of how things were going on this team, I was working on some cool projects and wasn't sure what was right for me, career-wise.
Then I had a argument with a new manager as he doesn't remember agreeing to allow the developers to estimate their own tasks. He was annoyed I told him we can't do X in 2 weeks, we previously asked for 2 months.
That was enough to knock me over the edge, so I handed in my notice, took the job with much more management style responsibility and hoping for a fresh start.1 -
Our PM is on vacation. And our CTO/CEO takes control of the PM role.
So today he decided it was time to just start a customer change request. Regardless of the customer not having approved the actual solution and estimate.
He just said that he did not want to waste any more time talking to the customer. Now they are gonna get what ever he thinks they want.
I predict this to backfire in a fabulous way. What could possible go wrong🤔4 -
From a design meeting yesterday:
MyBoss: "The estimate hours seem low for a project of this size. Is everything accounted for?"
WebDev1: "Yes, we feel everything for the web site is accounted for."
-- ding ding...my spidey sense goes off
Me: "What about merchandising?"
MerchDevMgr: "Our estimate pushed the hours over what the stakeholders wanted to spend. Web department nixed it to get the proposal approved."
MyBoss: "WTF!? How the hell can this project go anywhere without merchandising entering the data!?"
WebDev2: "Its fine. We'll just get the data from merchandising and enter it by hand. It will only be temporary"
Me: "Temporary for who? Are you expecting developers to validate and maintain data?"
WebDev1: "It won't be a big deal."
MyBoss: "Yes it is! When the data is wrong, who are they going to blame!?"
WebDev1: "Oh, we didn't really think of that."
MerchDevMgr: "I did, but the CEO really wants this project completed, but the Web VPs would only accept half the hours estimated."
Me: "Then you don't do it. Period. Its better to do it right the first time than half-ass. How do think the CEO will react to finding out developers are responsible for the data entry?"
MerchDevMgr: "He would be pissed."
MyBoss: "I'm not signing off on this design. You can proceed without my approval., but I'll make a note on the document as to why. If you talk to Eric and Tom about the long term implications, they'll listen. At the end of the day, the MerchVPs are responsible to the CEO."
WebDev1: "OK, great. Now, the database, it should be SQLServer ..."
I checked out after that...daydreamed I was a viking.1 -
Salesperson makes commission on sales, CTO gets bonus for going to out of office meetings, designer gets bonus for every design finished. What does the web developer get?
Answer: "we can't afford to give out bonuses just for doing your job."
There are 10 websites to build in the next 6 months, 3 brand new offices in different states that need it equipment ordered and installed by me, and the other 160 clients who all think their edits are most important.
And to top it all off, every time I give an estimate for the work, boss says "just give it to them." Gee, maybe you could afford to pay me a living wage or incentivize me to keep working 6+ hours a night at home if you stopped giving away everything I build for free.
You lower the value of my work and every other web developer out there when you tell clients that the website I built them isn't worth paying for. If every one of the free sites on my list was just charged the minimum $10k, I'm looking at $200k on this board that could have been used to hire me some help or increase my pay to make me feel appreciated.
I love my job and the people I work with, but when you aren't making enough to pay the bills and you work 70+ hours a week something has to change.8 -
Today the CEO asked us to create KPIs to follow a junior tasks, daily.
The problem it's he wants KPIs to foretell problems or delays in his tasks.
The junior is analyzing 14 years old C++ code, made by an electrical engineer who had all worsts practices possible when coding.
We explained that we couldn't make real, true KPI that would foretell the advancement due to complexity of the legacy and the fact that the junior had NEVER USED C++.
SO.... He asked to know how many code lines he made daily and an estimate of how many lines he'll have to do to complete the task.... So he could foretell advancement.
....
....
It was the 5th time in less than 60 days, that the CEO bypass totally the CTO to ask some stupid useless shit. So now all developpers have resign, complaining about the CEO actions/stupidity.2 -
A tip to tech folks from my personal xp.
If you fuck up and make an impacting mistake in your company, like taking PROD down, noone is going to fire you on spot. Assign some more mandatory trainings - maybe. So you'd be more careful next time.
See, it's not worth getting rid of someone who made a mistake. You should be seated down and insisted to fix it. If you don't - then they might consider firing it. If you do fix it [with help or alone] - you become a more valuable asset to the company as you prove you are responsible for your actions and you take it seriously. You show that you can clean up your own shit and you don't need a babysiter next to you.
If you simply make a mistake and they replace you with someone else, that someone else is likely to be unaware of your mistakes and is doomed to repeat them. It's just bad for business.
Ofc if you making mistakes becomes a tendency rather than an exception, it's also a red flag for the business.
Don't get too laxed! And always answer for your shit. Never hide a fuckup - always alarm about it asap so that corrective actions could be taken by respective organs of the company while you are fixing it.
Come up with an action plan, announce it. Estimate resources you need [like help from others] - announce that too. Update concerned parties every half an hour or so about the status. If you find you need anything else while fixing it or you come across some blockers/delays/change of impact - always announce asap. Do avoid false alarms and disinformation.
// inspired by someone's rant today7 -
Boss: I don't want you spending more than 30 min looking into the problem.
Me: ok
Go back to desk and read or watch some cs training. Maybe related.
Go back to boss.
Me: going to take (over estimate tome) to fix.
Boss: ok.
Go back to desk and fix in less time than estimated.
Look like gold.3 -
I've decided that whenever a non technical person be it a client or a non technical PM tells me it's easy or tells me it'll take only x hours, I'm going to tell them to either do it themselves, or let me do my estimate calculation. You don't fucking understand one line of what I do yet you can magically calculate the amount of time I'll take on the task? No fucking thank you sir.2
-
- Project for a 40+b$ company.
- No business analysis.
- Only some 64 pages tech paper dividing the project in 4 iterations (pretty well written).
- « Please estimate the first iteration ».
- Can we do it in 2 weeks? Only items in first iteration, I think we can but we need a BA before we accept the project.
- Confirmed by senior dev front. 10 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- Confirmed by senior dev back. 12 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- UX/UI senior designer says he can't estimate such a technical, says we defo need a BA before any estimations.
PM, who is actually the department manager, says OK we can do it. No BA and estimations are halved, UI/UX 2 days.
He fucking signs the contract.
SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, WE NEED STUFF FROM FUTURE ITERATIONS IF WE DON'T WANT TO THROW AWAY ALL THE FIRST ITER WORK.
PROJECT BECOME A CLUSTERFUCK.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING. THE CLIENT HAS NO CLUE EITHER.
The fucking dep. mgr assigns another PM and says he don't have time anymore.
NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHAT THE PROJECT IS AT THIS POINT.
We have 3 days left.
Whole team came to a conclusion: the only sane thing to do is to give our grouped resignation letters.
Thanks. It was fun while it lasted. Your dep. can go to hell.5 -
Boss: I need you guys to give me an estimate on how long this project will take.
Team: We've put a lot of thought into this, and we think we can get it done in 2 months.
Boss: I need it next week.2 -
Scrum Master: Let's estimate the task. Chose your estimations individually, then we will reveal at the same time and discuss
- variety of votes, ranging from 1 to 8
Product Owner: I don't agree, this should be a 1 or 2.
Dev Team Lead: Agreed, this is why I chose 2. Let's vote again.
- All votes now are 1s or 2s
Good fucking job 🤨11 -
HAVE YOU JUST TRIED TO BARGAIN ON MY ESTIMATE?!
I really hate when people try to bargain on my estimates. It's done when I say so. I really think it through before I tell you the deadline, so GO FUCK YOURSELF PLEASE AND SHUT THE FUCK UP. NEVER EVER BARGAIN ON THAT AGAIN.
If you do, it will take one week longer for every time you try it.7 -
I hate it when I don't have all the requirements or they are fuzzy and I'm asked to estimate the task/project.5
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Hardcore loli porn.
Just kiddig. Video games and math study. I believe that the most elegant solutions come in the form of math and the challenge they impose as well as the satisfaction of getting the correct result (or the estimate for it) are comparable to running a succesfull application.11 -
Manager: What's your time estimate on that latest ticket?
Dev: It's literally written in the "time estimate" field on the ticket, even in standard human units like "hours", "minutes", and "seconds"
Manager: ...
Dev: ...9 -
A few weeks ago, I was joking with a friend with how PMs aren't able to understand how weird are dev time estimations and how much they love meetings.
He: "Well, we can make a meet to estimate the hours of doing that"
Me: "Or better: We can make a meet to estimate the meet of estimations"
Three days ago, we are with the PM on the weekly meeting. In a part of his lovely speech, he asks:
"What if we meet the Thursday to estimate the weekly meeting for estimations?"
Obviously we laughed instantly, and he 'forget' he spoke that.1 -
Biggest distraction while working?
Management.
-> Get ticket to work on. Put an estimate and start working.
-> Management Guy #1: Hey could u please look into... this and that?
-> Management Guy #2: Hey could u please update me on (Old ticket that was fixed and updated on Jira but they would rather ask me in person).
-> Management Guy #3: Do you want to come outside for a smoke break, I know our last one was about half an hour ago but still, just 5 mins won't hurt your day.
-> Co-worker: Hey could you help with this task I am working on? I swear it won't take more than 5 mins. (It takes about an hour).
-> Miss my deadline for the ticket and get flamed for it by manager.
Okay, I didn't mean to say anything about co-workers as a distraction. It's very minimal.6 -
Coworker: We you have to estimate these tasks.
Me (thinking): This task should take one day, but I'll add 4 hours in case something unexpected happens again.
* Estimates 12h
Coworker: Alright, the tasks for this sprint have been selected. Please start to work on them.
Me: * Starts working on certain task
* Sees time available for task
2d 4h (=20h)
* Writes coworker
Dude, that much time is overkill for that task!
Coworker: Yeah, the client said something similar.
Me: Then why did you estimate it that high?
Coworker: 🤷♂️
Me: Ok, what am I gonna do with all that extra time? 😑
Coworker: 🤷♂️
Thanks mate.
Around 4 hours in and almost done. What should I do with that extra time?
Task in question: Add a mutually exclusive field to a database table, add it to the form, test it and update the docs.
Enjoy the unrelated, clickbait cat
13 -
Asking a developer for an estimate is like asking a doctor how long it will take to perform an appendectomy.
Making that estimate a hard date is like telling the doctor, "We need this finished in 45min, no matter what... NO MATTER WHAT!"4 -
how to become a true scum master:
- formulate jira tasks for your inferiors as vague as possible, best they don't make any sense
- before sprint start, ask the subhuman being to estimate storypoints, and if they say they can't really tell with this description and choose the highest estimate, say "okay, let's estimate it to one sprint length", so they can actually work on it within one sprint (which makes total sense)
- if the scum dares to question the content of the ticket and begs for more details, be like teflon and give no useful answer at all. if they continue asking for a meeting to discuss the ticket, tell them to have a meeting with a coworker about it (who also has no clue). don't be available for them because you have more important stuff to do.
- bully them during daily standups that they didn't create clear subtasks from this task and criticize them because you have no idea what they are doing. tell them they are having performance issues and suspect them to sit on their lazy asses all day.
- criticize the team in general for bad performance, bad item tracking and never say something nice, to make sure everybody loses even the last bit of intrinsic motivation for the project.
stay tuned to learn how to make yourself a skull throne out of those filthy dev smartasses ^.^7 -
Oh yeah that shouldn't take too long right? I mean it's just the front end.
No shut your fucking dumb ass mouth up. It will take long. The front end is very complicated, and your stupid fucking ass who couldn't learn to code is in no position to estimate how long it will take. Do us all a favor and stick to the "business" side. Fucking incompetent idiot.
If you're not a programmer, when it comes to estimating how long a task will take. Just shut the fuck up. Just cause you work in this industry does not qualify you to estimate a task. Just shut the fuck up.1 -
Why management has such orgasmic attachment to numbers?
Example 1.
Mngr: split this into tasks
Me: done
Mngr: now estimate these tasks
Me: can't. Team is new and codebase is unknown. Any estimations would be subjected to huge error and I will not commit to anything if I'm not at least partially sure.
Mngr: but we need some timeline
Me: so give it yourself. I'm not doing it
Example 2.
Mngr: we need to measure how your knowledge sharing sessions impacts our organisation
Me: how?
Mngr: e.g. amount of bugs lessen in next quarter
Me: bugs can go up and down because of hundred other reasons. Also, knowledge sharing is just to inspire people, it's up to them if they keep educating and growing. Me sharing knowledge 1h per week, I can't guarantee they will understand and apply this new knowledge.
Mngr: but we need to measure it somehow, otherwise it is useless.
Me: <speechless facepalm frustrated>22 -
I hate doing estimates, but I had to adapt. Since I work remotely and under contract, I'm used to track my time and estimate by hours.
I did a lot of mistakes before, which means I worked for free to wrap up fixed price projects.
Today, the method that is working best for me is:
1) positive estimate
2) most likely estimate
3) worst case estimate
Sum up and divide by 3.
I do this for every task.
Also, for Web projects, I like to divide tasks in categories like: HTML / CSS, UX, programming, testing.4 -
Jesus titty fucking Christ people are stupid. I hate everyone in the software development lifecycle that isn’t a developer or isn’t technically minded. Everyone else seems to be a fucking goofy arse mother fucker.
I just got in trouble because I fixed a defect that never should have been fixed, even though in yesterdays standup they brought it up and asked me what the status of it was. Apparently I was just supposed to estimate the defect and see how long it would take to fix. Why the fuck wouldn’t we do that in a grooming session or a sprint planning session, you are just begging to confuse the devs. Absolute mud sharks.9 -
I am so fucking done with all these incompetent fucktards!!! Why would you keep a client-brief in secret from your colleagues?! Why on your screwed delusional Earth you think it is perfectly okay if you don’t communicate the changes ahead your team? How could you - microbrained prehistoric dinosaur who petrified to your own semen - think that I can estimate with my time and do my work when you are barely able to think ahead 2 minutes without letting me know the actual scope and deadlines???!!! AND NO telling me the day before NOT GONNA MAKE IT VALID!!!! You failed in life you failed in evolution you played my trust and I don’t give horseshit about your career! Go fuck a hedgehog, eat it and shit out on the same fucking day. Tomorrow a new era starts and prepare yourself as I am hereby vow that I am not going to care any of your bullshit! I vow that every time you come to me with a new task, I will start it WHEN I can and do it between 9 and 17 and if anyone asks I will calmly tell the hard truth about the overbred, human shaped, evolutional dead end you are...5
-
I've been offered some freelance work.
The marketing guy in me says I can do it in 1 month. The technical guy in me knows I'm bullshitting.2 -
When the client decides not to do a feature because he finds your estimate unreasonable, then tries to add the missing functionality as a "bug" to another feature that's already estimated.3
-
Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.
I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.
60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.
Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.
In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.
But it wasn't.
Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).
But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.
He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.3 -
I work for a web agency.
Over the last 18 months a company asked us about 5 different quotes for rather minimal changes to their website.
While being minimal changes, estimating costs for them still requires several hours of work for research, meetings, correspondance and writing the damn things. They never even gave us a response (neither positive nor negative), except once where they told us that they wouldn't pay for project management because their instructions are so clear that PM isn't necessary.
As a response to the last one, after several months, they send us a 10 pages long pdf with requirements for a new website (or a "restyle" like they call it, even if it has absolutely nothing in common with the current one).
We inform them that we can't permit ourselves to continue studying new solutions for free and therefore tell them that a detailed offer would cost them something like 300$, and that amount would then be discounted from the eventually accepted job. We also roughly estimate a price range of about 15k - 20k for the new website.
We get an email back, from the CEO (until now it was a secretary), with essentially 3 arguments written in condescending form:
1. he brags about his revenue being over 9 billion $$$ a year, and that being a part of a global holding for which "communication is essential" (sic.) means that they need to coordinate and "can't simply accept an offer" [even if it's 400$, for specific change exactly requested by them, I guess...]
2. 15k is too much [... for the website representing this 9 billion dollar holding on the internet, for which the requirements are written in the 10 pages long pdf]
3. He asks for a meeting
We accept the meeting, we go to their office.
When we arrive there, the secretary informs us that the CEO will not participate. So we talk the her and the head of the "Communication Dept" in videoconference.
I explain them that if the sum, which we thought would be appropriate (~15 - 20k), is too high, the Pareto principle would allow us to, theoretically, achieve about 80% of the features and quality for about 20% of the cost. Their genuine response is:
"So your estimate was wrong! You can do it for much less!".
I try to explain them that the most money in a project goes into "attention to detail".
The "Communication Dept." person, who is "doing this job since too much time" (sic.), refuses to believe and insists that "details" don't exist on the web.
I tell her: "In any kind of work, the more effort you put into something, the better it tends to get, with diminishing returns".
She insists: "I don't understand this".
So now I'm here, doing the 6th offer, free of charge, for a 5k website, for a company that generates 9kkk revenue each year, trying to define a "Definition of Done" that works out.
FML I guess.
Sorry for the long post.7 -
It's 17:55... Did much work that day since I came in earlier than usual, so I could leave in time and do some shopping with the girlfriend.
A colleague comes in to my room, a tad distressed. He had accidentally ran a fixture script on a production environment database (processing a shipload of records per minute), truncating all tables...
Using AWS RDS to rollback the transaction log takes up about 20m. I had to do that about 5 times to estimate the date and time of when the fixture script ran... Since there was no clear point in time...
Finally I get to the best state of the data I could get. I log in remotely run some queries. All is well again... With minor losses in data.
I try to download a dump using pg_dump and apparently my version is mismatched with the server. I add the latest version to aptitudes source list of postgres repo and I am ready to remove and purge the current postgres client and extensions...
sudo apt-get remove post*
Are you sure? (Y/n) *presses enter and enters into a world of pain*
Apparently a lot of system critical applications start with post... T_T4 -
Producer: "We need this new feature by next Wednesday's release. Enter estimates into the task, ok?"
Me: ಠ_ಠ
hint for the estimate: by next Wednesday1 -
Not mine, saw this one somewhere on the internets [prolly in one of commitstrip's comments]
- make an initial estimate [4 hours]
- double the number [8 hours]
- incr units [8 days]2 -
When i worked for a large, international bank (whose name rhymes with shitty), I always had to use the following formula to estimate projects.
1. Take estimate of actual work
2. Multiply by 2 to cover project manager status reports
3. Multiply by 4 to cover time spent in useless meetings.
4. Multiply by 2 to cover user support and bug fix tasks.
5. Multiply by 2 to cover my team lead tasks.
6. Multiply by 3 to cover useless paperwork and obtaining idiotic necessary approvals to do anything
7. Finally, multiply by 3.14159 to cover all the other stupid shit that the idiots that run that company come up with.
It's only a slight exaggeration. Tasks that required less than a day of actual coding would routinely require two weeks to accomplish and get implemented.6 -
In my country, almost every college student is expected to finish their degree and apply for an internship, with some universities forcing them to do it and making it a requirement to finish their studies.
Now, this wouldn't be so bad if almost every internship employer in the country didn't expect you to work for free. Seriously, I can estimate 80% of the internships pay you NOTHING. WTF.
Fortunately this is not the case for CS, but every time I tell somebody I recently started an internship, they will ask me: "Oh, but they don't pay you anything, do they?". Of course they pay me! I wouldn't be going to an office every day for 4 hours to do someone else's work if they didn't!!
Why the fuck is it even legal to employ somebody and not pay them a cent, just because "it will look good on your resume"?? And why do people still accept this shit??
Is is like that on other countries as well?2 -
Project management site, exclusively for use by our team and clients.
- The client creates a new project.
- They list the requirements, supplying all the necessary files and content.
- We challenge any stupid stuff by offering alternative solutions.
- We all sign off on the requirements and no more are allowed to be added or modified. If they forgot anything, it's on record who's to blame.
- We estimate time and cost to complete the build.
- If they accept, we finally begin the work
- At each stage of every requirement, we mark the status as pending, in progress, ready for testing and delivered.
Much less stress due to minimising change requests. Plus easier to follow than an email chain and easier for them to use than a jira portal.6 -
I missed a week of school while I was sick, and in that week my teammates made a deal with the client to have a prototype for him in 3 weeks, AFTER asking me (teamleader) how long it would take (4 weeks min.). Why don't they FUCKING listen to their teamleader!! They're gonna have a bad time in the future...
And now I have to spend my whole night writing a prototype because THEY told a wrong estimate...3 -
Customer: "Yeah we need <insert bonkers 12 step circular logic> to find a thing(s) in the database."
Me: "Ok let me diagram this out and I'll send it to you to review.... but man this seems like the 8th version of this we're doing right?"
Customer: "Yeah well <employee Y> says they can't do B, C without this."
Me: "Wait... can't they just <insert the most simple step in the history of time> in step A, and then later on they won't have to do all this hunting later? Like you have that data at step A right?"
Customer: "Yeah but <employee Y> doesn't want to do that."
Me: "She's your direct report ....."
Customer: "Yes...."
Me: "Ok.... I'll send you the diagram and the cost estimate...."
Whatever reason sometimes it is a bit draining coding madness compared to making things actually efficient / people's jobs easier...3 -
Our boss did always the same thing. When there was a BIG potential customer who indicates a small interest in our software, then he lied constantly about features. After the customer bought our software we got a deadline and should develop the missing features. I could remember two features: The first one was a quote tool for a car transport company. The tool should estimate a price for a transportation from an email with no structure and the other one was an API which should be possible to write dynamicly to MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, MSSQL, DB2, Mongo or better said any possible dbms. The API should guess the structure of the dbs and offer CRUD actions. The funny thing is must write the api with go. Yeah dynamic and GO.
At some time, we told him we wont make any overtime and if the deadline is not possible we told that immediatly the customers, so that they call him. Thank god I don't work anymore in this company.1 -
Manager: yo I need a time line for this shit.
Me: I don't know how long it takes.
Manager: tell me how long it takes.
Me: I can tell you what can be done in next couple hours. I don't even know what will happen tomorrow.
Manger: now tell me this time shit.
Me: .......
Seriously, dear fellow ranter. How do you estimate timeline? Your timeline is changing.5 -
A delicious Sprint Planning 😋
It was a hard sprint (SCRUM methodology), but finally we were on our next’s sprint planning meeting. We had a lot of tasks to define and estimate. For the first one, we all estimated the task with 5 points, and for the second one we voted for 3 points. We were coordinated XD so, our boss said “let’s do something, if all of you vote, let’s say, 5, and another votes for a different number, he or she’s gonna buy us a six pack of beer”. Challenge accepted.
Two partners and I have to buy beers for this friday after work 😂 I don’t even mad 😋🍻
3 -
about 18 years of "oh, you made this? that's nice, but don't you want to do/learn something you'll actually get paid for instead?" as a reaction to any game prototype i made and showed them. until i got my first programming job. after that, silence and pretending the previous 18 years never happened (except the since forever running "joke" of "oh, you're not going to finish it anyway").
also, the one time i begged my (dtp/graphic artist) mom to draw me some backgrounds for my game, because at least one time in my life i wanted to not have to work on a thing completely alone, it took about three months of begging and convincing, upon which she finally said "ok, i'll try", and after another month, and one unfinished image that i estimate took about an hour to make, she told me "sorry, i don't think i can make what you need".
also some years of having "maximum 2 hours of computer time per day, unless it's the weekend" rule.3 -
Two weeks is just enough time for the person who asked for the thing to forget when they asked for the estimate.
-
We use scrum in our company.
And with scrum I mean we don't have a scrum master, our senior developer is the project owner, we estimate in hours and the estimate is binding, so you are not allowed to work longer on a task than the estimate.
So yeah.. "scrum"4 -
First I write a list of all the features that the client wants on their website, then I break down the features into tasks, then I estimate the number of hours required for each task, then I sum all the hours and multiply the final number by 3.1
-
Estimate for writing a custom WordPress plugin:
1 hour - Learn the API the plugin will support
1 hour - Review how plugins are written
60 hours - Set up XAMPP only to find that the version with PHP 7 no longer supports MySQL but something called MariaDB which my host doesn't support and then uninstall XAMPP and install MAMP only to get really frustrated setting it up and beat myself for not just buying that $99 Windows Pro upgrade so I can install Kalabox with HyperV which is much easier than all of this and why doesn't Kalabox have a way of supporting Windows Home because not everyone buys Windows Pro or can afford a Mac or has time to screw around with 100 possible Linux distros to figure out which one will work best and then buy gasoline and matches and set it on fire and watch it all buuuuuuurn such pretty fire.8 -
Tesla is 3 months late delivering our power walls after their 9 month estimate and now we are going to lose power from this tropical storm! Uggg extension cords and a diesel generator it is. Since this is a small company the “Director of Technology” title is very inclusive, so guess who’s gotta deal with getting this stuff situated, yep, yours truly.3
-
I am the only developer for a nationwide company. Everyone else in this company has no idea about IT, from the owner down.
I have about a year of actual IT experience, so God knows how I got this role.
Fellow developers, especially .NET developers, how do you estimate the time required to complete tasks set by none technical people?9 -
The. Fuck. I absolutely hate it when my supervisor asks me for a time estimate on a project when I have never used the language/framework for that project before. It's like saying, "Here's a winding path you've never run before that you need to run through. How long will it take you to get to the end?" Gosh, it's like the don't ever think about what they just said.3
-
Hardest thing about software development to me is estimation of time needed to complete. There should be an algorithm that knows to estimate better than me, shouldn't it? Like google maps navigation knows precisely in advance when I will arrive somewhere taking a car or a train, perhaps they could do my development estimates for me?9
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I made a New Year's Resolution to take more of an interest in my Internet privacy. Feel like it's something I should have done a long time ago. I've stopped using Google search (DuckDuckGo instead), moved away from my Gmail account (Tutanota instead) and stopped using Chrome (Firefox/Firefox Focus instead). I've had my Gmail account since they first announced it and you could only sign up if someone invited you. It felt good to delete 7000 emails and what I estimate must have been 13-14 years of Google/YouTube searches. Currently experimenting with VPNs, considering paying for ProtonVPN soon.9
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My firm works for this one design firm(they shall go unnamed) Let's call them BPOS, they ask us to customize a WordPress site, saying "it's very simple". They the proceeds to send us a psd file for us to refer to.
The file has a 6 fold homepage design with all the images on it in lines and ellipses. Their designer doesn't believe in folders to organize.
I send it back saying it's too disorganized. They then ask us for a time line, and I delay answering it.
I get the revised Psd and look and behold, folders. Though misspelled completely.
I go through the design and 'what a surprise' , the design and the theme don't even remotely match up.
We had agreed on a modest budget to do this with a 50% advance. The advance hadn't been sent.
They send us 4 psd files. 4 pages and asked us to estimate the cost.
Long story short. A project that should have taken 1 week to execute, has taken 2 months. And is still going on.1 -
I really don't like billing time for things I am not really sure how to do and need time to educate myself on. This happens more often than my wallet is comfortable with and I spend more time learning than making money. How do you go about staying in an estimate or fixed budget when something comes up that you don't know anything about?7
-
Whatever duration estimate you have on a project, double it. Better in the clients eyes that you finish early than scrambling for time toward the end or finish late.1
-
My pm requested me to estimate few tasks on a new project(single page app), the problem was that he was creator of these tasks, so we ended up with
- Create back button
- Create next button
- Create table with contents
... etc
As I prefer to take things literally I estimated each task as they literally should (5 min for adding buttons etc). So all tasks together were estimated for about 5h, while whole project was estimated for 100MD. After few talks and discussions we ended up with:
- Create back button
- Create back button logic
- Create next button
- Create next button logic
etc1 -
Keep this in mind: I don't like WordPress and PHP at all!!!
So a couple of days ago my boss asked me if I could extend a custom made WordPress plugin made by our intern. First thought: sure why not? Boss says: it has to be done in less than 100 hours of work (an estimate done by my boss and the intern). Me: I can't tell you that before I have seen the code and what functionality has to be in the extension. Boss: Cool, look it over this weekend and tell me if you want to do it or not.
I looked it through and my answer will probably be: NO WHERE IN HELL am I gonna are this in less that 100 hours! 1. no tests has been performed so I have absolutely no clue if his code works.
2. variable names are mostly: $string_query (whatever that means?), $result, $string_temp and so on.
3. Methods and functions are more than 250 lines long, with shitty formatting, and more comments than code. WTF?
4. The estimate has been made by an intern and my boss (doesn't know much about programming). I haven't been consulted about it....
5. No version control. No branches, no commits other than initial commit. Great.
6. Most comments in the code just tells me what I can read from the code. What it returns and what it takes as params. Can I please know wtf your method call named $booking->run () does? I still haven't found this method in the code after 1 hour of intensively looking for it...
FFS man... Not gonna do this, even though I thought it would have been an interesting project initially.
Sorry for the long rant... I just wish the intern would have consulted me about all this shit, since he obviously have bad practices. *sigh*6 -
Programming contest assignments, first level:
1. "...if you don't know how to return values from a function, you can just print them"
2. "...if you don't know how to read files, you can assume data is in global variables"
3. Required recursion
4. "...and estimate its time complexity.", "You may pre-process the data, but use at most o(n^3)", "your algorithm must use under n^3 operations"
That escalated quickly!1 -
Holy shit. In a meeting that literally makes no sense. We're taking credit for work by claiming story points. Story points. How the hell does that work? Especially since we have told management CONSTANTLY that story points are abstract LOE shit and NOT time spent. Yet I suggest if we REALLY want to estimate who worked what we track time spent I get shot down. You can't get a concrete measurement from an abstract concept. Also, we're being encouraged to argue over who does what? What does THAT help? AND we're not even reestimating if we over or under estimating, but being forced to massage our numbers into the estimate. What the fuck?4
-
Things story points are great for:
- Helping the team estimate their workload for a sprint
- Discussing the relative complexity of a task / story
Things I will slap you for, hard:
- Arguing that all the easy stories you plan to pick are actually infinite story points to make you look better
- Going "yeahhhh look at me I did 5 more story points this sprint than Bob, I'm amazinggggg"
- Trying to subtly change the story point assignment after you pick a task so you can do the above while doing sod all work
- "Hmm your team only did x story points this sprint, but team poopoo over there did x+10, what's going on?!"4 -
At one of my previous gigs, the IT director was just some guy that dated the bosses daughter. When she inherited the company he went from entry level data analyst to his new director position. IF he decided to show up to work at all it would be at just in time for lunch, and then he'd head out shortly after.
This guy would ask for an estimate on development and then start the timer when marketing started working on the project. This would often lead to us estimating something like 4 months on a project, and then waiting on marketing for 3 of those months, leaving us with 30 days left.1 -
In "Sprint Planning", the team is supposed to come up with stories, break those down into tasks, estimate those tasks as a team, then let devs choose what tasks they want to work on based on the stories pulled into that particular sprint.
Instead, our manager creates the stories. He assigns the stories to each developer and then has that developer announce his theoretical tasks (without any research on feature's or project's requirements!) in front of the entire team. So, when I say, "I think it will take me 6 hours to implement this feature", he says, "6 hours? I think it will take 3." and then types the estimate as 3. I have so much rage when that happens. Then we continue to sit in the room for 2.5 hours where we go through this long data entry mess of him typing out tasks and second guessing estimates. There is no team deliberation or collaboration, its whatever the manager says.
While there are many issues I take with this approach, my pet peeve would be the second guessing of the estimates. It would make sense for teams members to second guess estimates as long as they are the same teammates who have the ability and possibility to take on the tasks themselves.
But I disagree with a manager seconding guessing an implementation feature that "I" definitely have to do alone, and they do not possess the immediate knowledge to implement it themselves.5 -
Grabbed a case off of the backlog, and noticed the estimate was set to 100000 hours.
Time to get a coffee before tackling this task.4 -
Here's how it usually goes:
1) I estimate the different aspects of the assignment to the best of my abillities, based on customer criteria and information. I come up with an realistic estimate for development and testing.
2) My PM runs the numbers through an algorithm. It adds time for other stuff, but its all still very fair and in tune.
Now to the fucked up part.
3) My ceo and cto looks at the estimate, and he will just turn on every possible button and twist the estimate into what he thinks he can get the customer to pay🤢🤮
This ends in the customer saying - no thank you.
He comes back to us and does not understand why they declined.
Idiot! -
2 months into my first dev job, everything looks like a Jira ticket now.
Mum: wash the dishes
Me: create a ticket for that... i estimate the story points to be 27 -
Boss: What's the estimate?
Dev: A month
---
Boss: What if we add one more engineer?
Dev: Two months
---
...
Boss: If we add a PM
Dev: Trust me. You don't wanna know3 -
I estimate by guessing how long it will take me to code then multiply it by 3 and round up to the whole unit.
10-30min work = 1 day
2 day work = 1wk
1wk work = 2-3wks
1month = 3 months
If only I didn't have to deal with other people that take forever....
That and I feel lately whenever my boss ask me for a "quick" change or feature... I literally have to go "down boy down, stop thinking your in a candy store" like he's a little kid.1 -
Sweet talker but Incompetent colleague/team lead has given estimate of 350 story points (1point =1day) i.e more than an year and half, for one module to refactor. Worthless manager seriously considered to proceed with these estimates and ready to accept proposal.
When presented these numbers/estimates with wider audience, one senior engineer reminded everyone that module was developed few years back, in <2 months by 3 engineers.
Shame shame!12 -
I hate arbitrary deadlines.
Cocksuckers just pull them out of thin air and force me to give estimates about tasks that are impossible to give an estimate on.
(Spoiler: The tasks are the problem and need to be split and analyzed)2 -
My boss drives me crazy. He hired me for working on his SDK which is game related. So I am responsible for basically everything, including an ingame UI (menu etc.) and to predict the future path of a game object (unit, minion, ..) when a certain spell is casted on it. For that task I divided the prediction into firstly getting the predicted path of the unit without a spell being casted and then a class that would cast the spell on that path and estimate the units reaction to that cast. Simplified, but that way you get a pretty okayish result. Now he thinks that is too complicated. "Can we not put everything into one class, if someone wants to replace the prediction he needs to read documentation for hours". WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EXPECT, THAT IT'S GONNA BE SOME ONE CLASS 3K LINES MAGIC??
Same for the GUI. We only have DirectX and don't want to use a framework. Guess what, it's more than one class if you want to seperate view, model, controller or whatever fucking "design pattern" thing you use.
And then Git... he seriously said let's not use branches till release, I feel like they slow down things.. before I was there they did every operation on master.
And if it was just that..
/rant
I put much work into this, time to leave?1 -
Team outing.
Planned to send out a code review before the trip. Everything was ready.
Then, someone pushed new changes, and I got damn stuck in fixing the UTs.
Currently, ranting from the resort, missing the commit that wouldn't reach a code review.
I expected to finish this task in 1 hour. Well, I should never ever estimate things.
Note: Played a grand piano though.. yeahhhhh.. -
when the client starts asking for so much stupid changes.
Me: Ok sur, I will email you about those changes and the estimate time.
Inside Me: I may look calm, but inside my mind I killed you 5 times with 5 different ways.1 -
Client: Can you give me an estimate of how long this change will take?
Me: (meets with other devs for a good estimate, around 2.5 weeks, and gives to client)
Client: Great. Oh by the way we have a one week deadline.1 -
i am a weak developer, i dont know that much of what im doing, unexpected things come up, i dont like time estimates (estimating time is harder than complexity estimates), some school of thoughts dont like estimates https://youtube.com/watch/...
my manager posed a thought exercise to me, imagine im a contractor (im not, clearly not skilled enough to be) , contractors can estimate how much time precisely a task will take to do their work, get jobs, etc
is it possible to learn this power? how does one git so gud, walk in learn how existing code base works, change, edit , build on top of it, ideally doing quality work9 -
So, today timestamps within my database saved me. I have one titled "created_at" to indicate when the item was originally created.
Today a large client called up to complain that they have 296 bookings but only 288 menu choices (each booking has a menu choice). Basically, saying I'd "programmed it wrong [sic]" :(
After taking a quick look at the date the client originally added the menu and the date the missing bookings were created, I made a discovery.
It turned out the client was at fault. They had set an event (customers book events and bookings have a menu choice) live without associating the menu. This meant the event had been live without a menu for customers to book.
I simply compared the timestamps of the missing bookings to the date the menu was originally added. The customer most likely made the event live for period (I estimate ~45 mins), realised they hadn't associated a menu and then added it afterwards. Of course at this point it was too late as people had already booked.
No need for a huge email either. I condensed the above into a 5 sentence email.
Timestamps are soooo useful1 -
I once went to a client to get a brief for a website (the twat can't be bothered to write it, so he gets me to do it). I wrote all the details down and fired as many questions as I could. When I got back I wrote up the notes into a brief and sent it back to check before I costed it. He said it was spot on, so I sent an estimate. A few days later he must have shown it to another director, they both call me on speaker phone. Them: Will it do this, will it do that? Me: "It" doesn't exist, if you want to add some requirements then write or extend the brief and I will re-cost it.
They ignored that and rang a little later. Them: We have been discussing it, will it do .... and will it do.... Me: I repeated what I had said earlier, but my tone of voice had changed to reflect my annoyance. I never heard from these pathetic twats again. Moral: I always do background checks on a company, as well as accounts and financials check it's good to tap in to your network of colleagues, designers, freelancers. It can set the alarm bells going long before you commit any time. -
I think I'll finish this before lunch...
*lunch*
I think I will finish it today!
*end of the day*
Not finished... But almost
Been coding the whole day, but my estimation was way off :(1 -
Client: Can you lower that estimate?
Client: I know you’ve done, but can you make all this stuff behave this particular way on smaller screens, despite it not being in spec?
Me: *internal sigh* sure.
The perils of newly being a contractor and wanting to please.
At least I’m working from home and the money is good I suppose 😂3 -
So, apparently we need to establish an estimate before I start working on a task.
Why not rather let me get on and do the task, see how many hours it takes and then pay me accordingly?
This is for a freelance gig, just FYI6 -
- have a look at the project
- brake it down into smaller stories
- estimate the time
- multipy it with 1.5
- add 1-3 days of testing
- add 15% project management
- add a 2 days buffer
= be happy with being done in 2 weeks, present it in 4 -
Though I demonstrated a hard upperbound on the D(10) dedekind in the link here (https://devrant.com/rants/8414096/...), a value of 1.067*(10^83), which agrees with and puts a bound on this guy's estimate (https://johndcook.com/blog/2023/...) of 3.253*10^82, I've done a little more work.
It's kind of convoluted, and involves sequences related to the following page (https://oeis.org/search/...) though I won't go into detail simply because the explaination is exhausting.
Despite the large upperbound, the dedekinds have some weirdness to them, and their growth is non-intuitive. After working through my results, I actually think D(10) will turn out to be much lower than both cook's estimate and my former upperbound, that it'll specifically be found among the values of..
1.239*(10^43)
2.8507*(10^46)
2.1106*(10^50)
If this turns out to be correct (some time before the year 2100, lol), I'll explain how I came to the conclusion then.8 -
What I hate the most about my job?
Wrongly estimate the time required to do things…
Sometimes is good, I think it will take 3 days and I'm done in 1, but other times it's not!
e.g. today I estimated an easy implementation would took 5 minutes and it took 5 hours instead… fml13 -
For me, I personally just over estimate the time and take my time working on it. Take breaks whenever I need, that could be going for a walk, watching a few videos, etc.1
-
Man I am tired of my company's dogshit software release process.
We have to commit to fucking estimates for 6 months (2 quarters), SQA shadowing dev by 2 weeks, and freaking estimates and work done at the end are not even close. And then we call it a minor release. These shitty estimates are based on requirements that basically say "we want feature x, plz make it work". It's some fucked up agilefall garbage that does not work for shit.
We rush like motherfuckers during the final weeks because estimates are bullshit but we are still expected to be done with every story points which somehow are days instead of other better metrics.
I swear this fucking bullshit has been designed by the board so they could plan their money entries based on the software release.
The only reason this company actually still holds itself up is because the engineers are good at their job.
Go fuck yourself high management. -
I've been a "firefighter" on our big money-making project for like a year now and probably will be for the next year. Every sprint, fully booked out.
However, this sprint, some people think I have time to brainstorm, learn new tech and attend meetings related to a completely new project.
"Will it done in 2 weeks?"
"How long do you estimate?"
I can knock up a rough version of your fucking application in about a week if someone grows some fucking balls and schedules me some fucking time for it. STFU and stop interrupting my other work. Allocate some time or shove it up your ass so far until you regurgitate it then swallow it again and choke on it. -
In the last 24 hours I have been handed 3 tasks that are to be done on priority.
While my current queue will take upto a week to clear of, nobody thought of it.
When I'll present my time estimate for the completion of the new priority tasks, and when the deadline for the remainder of the tasks will be pushed back, I'll be asked a very simple question.
"WHY IS IT TAKING SO LONG?" -
I have had it with the new pm for my project. We've had to literally write down rules for him to follow on how we want to run our project.
- we always go over time on standup because he's asking everyone specific questions about each ticket we're working on instead of just letting us give our updates. Wrote a rule for not doing that.
- he gets overly excited to get things done to the point that he's approved a PR himself and merged a production release during off hours.
- we're a team of 3 devs but he has 7 big items he wants us to work on concurrently.
- we use jira to keep track of things but he insists on us updating a spread sheet that he made as well. We just straight up told him no but he'll bring it 3 times every week.
- he wants us to write a report of our daily progress in our jira ticket before we give the same updates on standup
- every time I give him an estimate, he tells the clients it's a promise we'll get it done by x date.
- he never pushes back and says yes to everything
- oh here's a funny one, he's "reviewed" my code several times
Idk what to do here anymore. We've literally talked to him about all of these issues. He'll change for a few days and go back to doing whatever he does.6 -
"we use story points as an estimate for how much time something will take to complete" or "X story points means Y days of work"
fucking kill me4 -
Take the worst possible estimate you can come up with. Multiply by 3.
Usually ends up pretty close in my case at least.3 -
Told my client last october that I would not be doing a migration.
Two weeks ago they wanted me to do the migration and I told them I will do my best to create estimates but that it was the first time.
Gave them a resonable estimate to migrate the content.
And last meeting they cut the time by 70% to meet the budget.
Fuck the budget, can't pay then you don't get the shiny new toy.
I'm a contractor, not a fucking employee. So all the extra hours are on me.
Going to give them a piece of my mind today.
If I lose this client, i don't give a fuck.1 -
Repeat/repost:
Unfortunately I do not own a drop of what is conventionally known as confidence or ego. It applies to everything; work, skills, relationships, friendships, you name it. I can estimate my chances of succeeding, and sometimes be pretend-delulu for a purpose (you gotta admit, sometimes showmanship is the biggest asset) but I don't understand confidence. In my opinion, it's just a gross overestimation of one's chances.
So this project/paper thing, I feel like I'm blind and running in the forest. I am not counting on my boss, nor am I counting on anyone in the dept to give me clarity or decent feedback. ("Cutting edge" research issues. Not anybody's fault.)
And I guess, in the worst case scenario the paper will be rejected, which would be a setback but not a full failure.
... Actually, that's not the worst case. The worst case would be someone running a peer review and finding that I made a tiny mistake and all my results are bullshit. 🤦
... Anxiety is eating me alive rn. 🤢4 -
Doesn’t everybody use Fibonacci story dev points to estimate stories?
Doesn’t.. everybody..? 😞
😭😭😭😭😭😭😭6 -
T(x, y)=x*(1+y/100)+√-1
x = hours estimated from Boss. if the boss
y = sum of the features with the following weight:
Multiplatform = 10
Web = 5
social * = 100
blockchain = 100
HTML-email = 10
Every other bullshit bingo term = 20
everything else = 1
Terms that appear multiple times count multiple times.
If the boss didnt give his estimate triple the feature-value and use 100 as x-value3 -
We estimated out how long a new project was gonna take using story points. It wasn't too big and the estimate came out to two months. We discussed it and it seemed to be all good.
Later on someone pointed out a Quora question where my boss asked why it would take so long to develop such a project.
My boss trusts people on Quora more than his own employees.2 -
"I want you do this *extremely vaguely described task* for our next project. Can you think for less than 30 seconds and give me an estimate?"1
-
What's the longest project you've worked on (in a passage of time type measurement)?. Mine' s a client website, 2 years (so far) in the making. 1 complete redesign, and re-written vast chunks of CSS and code because some of it was shit (2 yrs ago). Now it's super efficient and looking good. Still not finished though. Fortunately they know it's their fault and they have paid up to date, we are at double the original estimate now. I have not moaned at them because they have not moaned at my charges.2
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hi devrant!
about six months ago i posted that i was accepted into and starting at a coding bootcamp. next week is the last week of curriculum for me before i can choose to be a teachers assistant or finish my capstone project and graduate!
some basic info about the course i took:
- 6 months (3 months web dev 2 months CS 1 month capstone project )
- starts by learning the MERN stack
- includes noSQL and SQL dbs
- transitions into C and then python for computer science
- includes basic security info
- lots and lots of algorithm practice
- lots of job readiness stuff (resume writing, linkedin, etc, but i havent done that yet)
- lots of portfolio-able projects throughout the schooling experience
- previous cohorts have something like 40% (after 1month) and 70% (after two) job placement rates (rough estimate)
let me know if anyone is curious about anything related and id be happy to answer what questions i can! :)6 -
Today a company we work together to provide a service for a government sent us an update about the installation of the successor of the most hideous Data storage I had ever worked with. The successor comes from the same company and provided the previous one. Anyways, went like this:
"Even after a full day of installing/migrating the software, we could not complete the task.
The installation failed multiple times due to errors from the installer, as well as missing, undocumented dependencies.
According to our developers the installation process is miles away from a normal installation process for this day and age. Our developers often have to research errors on their own or ask the provider for assistance.
We cannot estimate when we will be able to complete the installation."
I've felt pain and sadness while reading that... -
Ideas:
1. Scrape github
2. Attach feature size estimate (an abstract scale) as examples across many projects.
3. Use this as prompt/finetunning data.
4. Train and prompt on project descriptions relative to feature size and number of contributors/changes in the changelog.
5. Package and release a model that takes descriptions of ideas and generates reasonable estimates of time and manpower.
6. Optional, sell as an estimate service to corporate and make money introducing some sanity to the world for a change.10 -
For the Danish, Danish-speaking, and Danish-understanding ranters:
Når du bliver spurgt om et estimat på noget du ikke har en jordisk chance for at estimere foreløbigt:
https://youtube.com/watch/...3 -
Always, always, with every estimate in time or resources you or your pm/manager/whatever thinks to need. Multiply that number by pi.
That's a more real-world estimate.8 -
I need to estimate how much ram and CPUs my team will need next year for our apps... That have yet to be built.
We load a lot of data feeds with batch processes running on a few large machines, some can use like 30 GB RAM at times...) which should be a lot less if we get the data real time I hope...
But wondering how to estimate well... I sorta did a worse case analysis where I just multiply and sum # CPUs/memory* nodes*approx apps...
Comes out to be like 600 CPUs and 800 RAM... So wondering if that's ok...
RAM is ok but # of CPUs is way higher bc now all the apps basically run on their own machines...14 -
In an IT management class, the professor wanted us to estimate the operation costs for a small IT company, breaking them down by service offered. I remember creating a markdown file, multiple times executing the line `echo $RANDOM >> estimations.md`. We rounded the numbers slightly, pimped the document a bit and submitted a nice PDF. When we had to present our work, the professor asked us how we had proceeded to calculate those results. We told him a story about an Excel file we worked on, but did not submit, because we thought he'd be interested in the end result and not care about those details. He asked us to submit that Excel calculation, because he wanted to comprehend our method. So we got together, created an Excel sheet, copied our "estimations" into column C and called it "service cost". For column B, we used the same "cost per man hour" value (scientifically estimated using the RAND() function) for every row. Finally, we divided the "service cost" by the "cost per man hour" for every row, put the result in column A and called it "effort (in man hours)". The professor, being able to "reproduce" our estimation, accepted our solution.2
-
I really hate it when I work on a user story consisting only of a cryptic title: "Implement feature X".
Esp. when I missed planning during a holiday and can only wonder who in their right mind would have given it 3 points.
Why thank you.
Sometimes, just pulling the acceptance criteria out of somebody's nose takes days. It doesn't get better once I realize that not all external dependencies have been properly resolved. It's worse if there are other departments involved, as then you get into politics.
Me: "We are dependent on team X to deliver Y before we should have even planned this ticket. I'm amazed that our team was even able to estimate this ticket as I would have only raised a question mark during estimation meeting. We could have thrown dices during estimation as the number would have been as meaningful and I'd have more time to actually figure out what we should be doing."
Dev lead / PO: "I understand. But let's just do <crazy workaround that will be live until hell freezes over> temporarily."
It's borderline insane how much a chaotic work flow is branded as agile. Let's call it scrum but let's get rid of all the meaningful artefacts that make it scrum.1 -
I gave a 2 day estimate to the managers once, and a 10 minute estimate to my peers.
The server side code went smoothly. Couple of minutes, done.
Then I remembered the front end was written under a tight deadline....
Imagine controlling state with jquery, except the state is in html slightly differently to hints in javascript, and there are 7 points of state control, and they have to be triggered in the right order because a few of them depend on everything else, and if you change the wrong line the computer starts pouring smoke everywhere and WHY THE HELL DID I NOT REWRITE IT!1 -
Asking for a precise or accurate estimate is asking me to predict the future, which is essentially asking me to lie to your face.
And I'm a terrible liar. Please don't make me lie.1 -
I'm afraid of tomorrow.
The last weeks.... Were shitty.
And I might finish the first part of the VM migration next week...
I planed for failure. Next week was the worst estimate...
Do you remember when you've played a game and noticed the sudden increase of ammo / health / mana bars and that the enemies got stronger? Endboss time? Fickity fuckity you'll die soon time?
I guess that's this tingeling feeling in my head...
And I'm realllllly scared, cause the last fuckup was a NIC brick on one of the VMs host server. Never had that before.
Pray satan that the week will show mercy.1 -
Don't even say your initial time estimate/guess out loud. It will probably become your deadline, and you probably assumed that most things would take a reasonable amout of time.
Bonus: Try to get onto projects that you think you can get interested in. Once on a project try to keep interested in it's success.8 -
Don't you just love estimating the story points of a ticket that is completely irrelevant to your role. How do I estimate work that I have never done in my life? 🙄4
-
Hi. I did an interview recently and failed. I could not answer this question properly.
Estimate the number of doctors needed in a town of 4million people.
I think it's more of a critical thinking problem. I dont know.
Whow knows how to explain this?33 -
100 weeks is a long time, and I'm not even sure I'm gonna survive! But my roughly estimate is by:
- wk125; I've managed to live on my savings; Because I'll (try to) finish any project and just focus on my thesis.
- wk150; I've defended my thesis. Now I apply for PhD and get rejected.
- wk175; Begging for my last job to get hired again.
- wk200; Thanking myself for not buying bitcoins back then.
Probably I'll also manage to learn Go somewhere there.2 -
Management: let's be agile... we can all meet and discuss a project that will take more than likely 6 - 12 months but you guys can estimate and create a road map....
Engineer: I'm not sure you understand agile3 -
customer claims they do scrum but they have quarterly planning events (2 full days) where we need to estimate and plan everything for the next 3 months.
Manager: "last quarter I calculated your velicoty so now you get 4 story points per sprint per developer"
Team: "But you started us off at just 5 per sprint that's too small"
Manager: "Ok but if you only did 4 why do you now want 20"
Team: "Because it's arbitrary and we say we want to"
Manager: "1 story point is 1 day"
Team: "story points aren't time"
Manager: "4 story points is 1 sprint"
Team: "but a sprint is 10 days"
Manager: "the junior dev can do 4 story points per sprint and the senior dev can do 4 story points per sprint"
Team: ...8 -
For the guys familiar with 3D printing.
Does your slicer also give you time estimates that are completely off? I'm printing something that would take 10 hours according my slicer. Started it at around 10 AM and its 1AM now and still printing. Halfway during the print I increased the printing speed to 150% because it was way to slow.
Is it just me or are the estimates completely off at each print and the longer the print takes the less useful the estimates are.
Any advice?4 -
Development planning:
Expectation:
Gather the requirements then estimate the deadline.
What are clients did:
Here is the deadline, then here are the requirements that we must squeeze into it.1 -
When you realise they are using computers and AI to estimate your level of humanness before deciding whether or not you are human enough [to pass the capcha].
Our humanity is up to machines already2 -
I love how the consultants Microsoft hired to estimate the savings upgrading to Windows 10 comes up with the number $404 per employee. I think there's a hidden message here...1
-
I hate quotes/estimates so damn much
Quote too high and we don't win the work
Quote too low and I screw myself/other devs over
And then there's the fact that most initial quotes for an entire project are based off nothing but a few marketing slides from the potential client; we do re-estimate after winning the work and nailing down what the client actually wants, but obviously it can't be too far from the initial quote
And then there are other people on the company (not devs, obviously) who like to casually expand the scope without checking how much time it'll add4 -
Is it just me or is everyone thinking the binary ++ counter is a good idea?
I think it’s really cool because it sort of hides the number of ++ you have behind a wall of laziness. Like people probably aren’t going to convert every score and I personally just look at the length of it as a rough estimate of how upvoted a user is.
I think this really helps eliminate the “likes contest” that can come with other social media. (And as a result reduces spam that is posted/reposted just to get likes)
Anyone agree? Disagree?5 -
Moments when you give wrong estimate and then have to sit up all night.
Fuck estimates. I will never get them right.1 -
Manager asked me to create a spreadsheet showing tasks in a project with percentage complete to send to client.
Sounds easy, even though I prefer JIRA, I created spreadsheet with all tasks and asked each developer responsible to fill in percentage done.
But I did it completely wrong. I have to give estimate for how long it took for each task and make sure total complete is 70 percent and number of days add up to 10. WTF guess the estimate to match the total. And this is how you teach me project management.
Did I mention that all this is happening after most of the project is done?1 -
So I got a call from a client wanting me to build a login , hierarchy signup , and possibly reporting website. I'm charging 50 an hour and qouted a 1000 rough estimate on number of pages need to accomplish task. Was wondering what everyone else charges for this?16
-
Today I got new project to estimate.
It's written on python... for windows XP... and code mostly written on Dutch 0_01 -
* break it into elementary steps, small enough to fit into your "estimation time unit", e.g. days or hours.
* estimate those steps for "developing at a leisurely pace" if nothing goes wrong.
* think about "what could go wrong" (list everything!) and adjust values accordingly.
* adjust total amount with experience values, like:
* times 1.2 for every manager
* times 1 to 4 based on which legacy projects i have to touch
and finally:
* multiply with `1+log(t/u,2)`, with `u` being the amount of useful data in the requirement description and `t` being the total amount of data in the requirement description
* sample: with our current "favourite" customer, about 90% of all tickets is garbage, so t/u = 100/10 = 10 => log(10,2) = 3.3 => multiply everything with 4.34 -
That moment you realize you just completed a task for a client because they asked for it but you didn't first check to see if the request was part of the original spec and estimate and so you don't really get to be paid for it.
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At my company we have a rule that ticket estimates can only be pointed using numbers from the fibonacci series. So 4 point tickets are not allowed!
We’re also discouraged from giving an estimate larger than 5, and told that tickets need to be broken down into smaller tickets if we think it’s more than a 5.
Also, ticket estimates must include the full amount of time for dev, QA, AND deploy. Given how hard it is to work with our tech stack, few tasks actually fit.
All of this may sound fine in principle, but in practice it’s extremely frustrating. I’ve protested a few times but I’ve been told I’m outvoted and nobody wants to reconsider the decision that was made sometime in the distant past. I was also told that “most other companies do it this way”, so therefore we have to as well.
This is the first company I’ve ever worked at which had this stupid rule. Is it this way at your company? Is this a NorCal tech company thing? I’ve worked at several companies outside of the SV bubble, and never encountered this.6 -
Step 1. Estimate a time based on previous experience working as a professional and qualified developer.
Step 2. Wrong -
In the ever-growing saga of the upgrade, here is another one.
In the daily scrum meeting, I chat about the upgrade, standard stuff.
The other dev pipes up - "Oh we had a meeting about that this morning and were going with a different approach"
Me - "wait, we're doing what now? You do know I've spent a month so far just on this upgrade?*
*silence*
Anyways I continue working on the upgrade, few meetings while I try to find out what's going on.
Spoken to BA, my line manager and the other dev didn't get much basically saying yeah this is how we're handing it now.
Well it turns out after writing a big long message to the other dev, he decided *yesterday* in a manager meeting (he's kind of a manager but not really) to propose a new approach and they all just leapt at the chance even though it's going to take way longer (2 years estimate) to patch up the system version by version until we get to the latest release.
So at some point today he sends me a message to stop what I'm doing and go and help with a product release and that we *are* doing this new approach and that he made the decision yesterday. I'm sorry but since when did he become my manager micromanaging me haha
So as the only one doing the upgrade, I only got told of this change in passing, the other dev said that he decided yesterday and didn't bother to tell me as he had other stuff to work on and neither did my line manager.
Seriously what the hell.
So hopefully the things I've worked on and done might get used in a year or two haha6 -
My project manager wants to automate a task. We tried to estimate how much time we would save... It is the full 5 minutes in a year (excluding time needed to update said script & append new functionalities)
Efficiency 1014 -
Every one of our sprint "planning" meetings.
We would sit and be told to estimate a bunch of defects we had never seen before. And then we wouldnt actually decide as a team what to commit to because it was assumed that we had to deliver everything in the backlog every sprint. This is what happens when you try to apply scrum to a maintenance team. -
Changing jobs sound exciting until you discover the onboarding experience.
No architecture overview, no presentation about core services. It's not a problem except that I have to navigate through the different services or hmmm the distributed ball of mud hmmm.
And then they ask you to estimate how long that X or Y ticket will take, so I give always the max possible number :D3 -
Estimating a rather simple looking project without a thorough examination of the client's code.
It turned out to be the worst kind of crap a human brain could produce. The project we estimated for 2 months is going to last 6... And if we decided to rewrite it the day we were to estimate it, it would be done in 6 weeks1 -
First, realize that trying to accurately estimate how much time something is going to take is akin to accurately predicting the future and that people who ask you to do it are stupid. Then realize that sales-oriented deadlines are the source of all that is evil. Then shift away from sales oriented software. Instead focus on selling existing features and new features on the roadmap have no deadlines, they're done when they're done. Then realize almost no workplace will let you truly do that because chasing the sale is all that matters despite the latest buzz word rhetoric. Then estimate enough buffer to give you a reasonable time to complete it without calling your abilities into question. Then finish it faster so you score points with management, but not every time because then they'll begin to expect it. Now you have leveled up in mind games, an unfortunate but necessary tool in the tool belt. Then hate on sales oriented software some more, rinse and repeat.
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guys I did it
I'm trying to set up a second Fiverr gig for tutoring Node.JS but i needed an estimate of how long it would take so my friend who doesn't like coding very much agreed to help me
and today he said he understood the cirriculum, was not overwhelmed and had fun
yay2 -
my manager pings me to get info on stuff he's coordinating with others.
such as, it this possible to do? what's the estimate? what's the flow?
and then he pawns it off as his own input.
and when the information flows back to me, I hear folks saying that he came with this idea/estimate.
maybe it's a typical manager thing to use engineer's input as their own grasp/knowledge of the project. at least they should extend the courtesy of acknowledgement.7 -
Communicated 50% more time than I actually estimate for a new feature because the management usually thinks it can be done faster than estimated.
Actually got that 150% approved so I have enough time to write some bad ass beautiful code with unit tests and documentation 😳
Seems like good things actually happen..1 -
I'm curious - how strict are you (or how strict is your lead / manager) about keeping stuff both detailed and up to date in Jira (both in terms of sprints & tickets)?
I've always drawn a pretty hard line with this - stuff in our Jira environment always has a detailed description, approximate estimate, is kept up-to-date with who's working on it, assigned appropriately, etc. But others I've spoken to seem to barely care if any tasks are in there properly at all.2 -
Sure just interrupt me constantly all day, I don't have anything important to do.
"Can you provide an estimate when X will be done?"
"Can you estimate how many questions my colleagues will have?"
Not even just interns. My god.1 -
Just got an email asking me to review an IDE called CodeLobsterIDE.
Has anybode ever heard of that?
I am sure they won't reply after I have sent them an estimate $$$ 😂2 -
so guys, I am going to ask you about something I am totally new on it.
what do you think about crypto currency mining? cam I do it using just my PC, if I can what is the estimate benefits?
do you advice me to proceed with this thing.15 -
The more I look back on it, the more I really see that this job has really thrown me to the wolves time and time again, only to laugh as I come back beaten and bruised.
They’ve given me objectives that were deceptively broad, no guidance, and then misguidance when I came back with a well researched opinion. They wanted me to estimate large projects without having worked on a large project. Plus, college leaves out the huge part of software work: deployment. I had to figure all that out on my own too.
The more I look back on it the more I see this place has been a complete shit show from the beginning. It was just the first job I didn’t have to do manual labor at so I valued it highly.
It’s time to move on to somewhere I’m not the constant scapegoat. -
Split everything into small tasks, no longer than two days of work
Use Fibonacci numbers, 1-2-3-5-8-13
A highly effective developer will produce about 80% of a work day. If you think a task is done within a day add 25% and your estimate is ten. Remember that we use Fibonacci and round up to 13.1 -
What the fuck is this trend of pricing cloud services by the minute? I mean It's fucking great and all that I buy 2 minutes with a sql db but who the fuck actually does that?
After another night working on a server I (strongly) suggest we move our shit to a cloud service. It's cool providing I promise the costs don't rape us blind folded. Seems easy enough, right? Nope it's not.
6 hours later, halfway to becoming a fucking network engineer and I'm more lost than ever.
Seriously can't the fuck AWS and google cloud show a monthly price - even an estimate for generic shit like $x for the average crappy wp blog!
If anyone has some helpful info / experience on the true cost of hosting generic web apps - the retardedly simple app I'm trying to price is:
1 php web application with 150 domains, 3gb mysql db and 30gb ssd.
I gets has 45000 sessions with 250000 page views.
Your help would be greatly appreciated. Currently I'm leaning towards deploying a clone sending 250 000 random requests and praying my $300 cloud platform credit will cover the bill.4 -
Oh god, here comes another math post! I can feel it coming on, like werewolfism during the full moon.
I'm only passingly familiar with logarithms, so this, like everything I've stumbled on, has probably already been discovered, but
n/(1/((n^(1/n))-1))
Is a pretty good approximation (within a couple percentage points, or three or more digits) of the natural logarithm for all the numbers I've checked it on.
For example if
n = 690841693
ln(n) = 20.35342125707679
while our estimate using the above formula comes out to:
n/(1/((n**(1/n))-1)) = 20.353421612948146
Am I missing something obvious here, and if so, what?
Am I doing the idiot savant thing again, or am I just being an idiot again?10 -
How many times are you interrupted during a normal day of work? Could you estimate ( on the fly) how many hours a week you lose becuse of that?5
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The bygone clowns have started their new project. I look at the FAQ page. It's literally lies, because I know what they've done so far.
"We've had thousands of clients!" no they haven't, lie.
"We estimate approximately % of customers..." they don't have enough data to support that, lie.
Since when did marketing become lying?
God I hate this planet.7 -
-fills out web form-
-company sends txt message-
Txt Message: "Thanks for contacting us about X, would you like to schedule <insert thing>?
Me Thinking: Oh awesome I can just schedule it via txt!
Me: "Yes, I would like to schedule time to get an estimate on <insert thing>."
Txt Message: "Please call us at..."
Me: "wtf... yeah I know your number."2 -
Be me at new job.
Just learned that bonus is tied to project estimate skills. Range is +- 25% of estimate vs reality.
They are waterfall. I've spent the last three years as Agile. -
LYFT has the worst shared ride algorithm. Why tf would it pick up people with completely separate destinations? With a time difference estimate that's over 30 minutes off. WTF Lyft.1
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Friday, late due trains, on schedule for presenting last month's work.
Mac OS have decided to update some unknown time and doesn't give an estimate..
Woo hoo...
Why did I ever agree to try a Mac for workstation, just because it's the default platform at work..1 -
Anytime a designer tries to make a development estimate or tells you what to do, immediately raise your hand and shout a firm “No!” - sometimes I hate these fuckers.1
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And that, folks, is why you never do a rush job, no matter how urgent, without an RFP and answering estimate followed by a signed statement of work confirming agreement to the estimate. Even with a prearranged, perpetual contracting agreement. And also why you NEVER deliver the end product without payment. No matter how much you trust your client or believe they will do right by you, process still matters.2
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So I'm on PTO for a week, and there is some feature for which I gave the estimations to the other team. That team thinks that eastimates are high and I'm getting pinged to think about it.
First of all they did the overriding of some feature which was required by our team without our knowledge and now when we got know what they did, they are asking us to do the work. I have an estimate and yes they are higher than expected because this feature is on their systems and I don't have complete understanding of it. This is ridiculous though but still I think that I'm wrong somewhere but I know this work is not easy for me, that's why estimations are high.
I'm on leave, I'm not supposed to be working anyway even if it's a small clarification.
Adding more here, that guy tagged another person from my team to do the work as I'm on leave. This guy did some work before too. But this is insane. HOW THE FUCK YOU EXPECT US TO DO IT FOR YOU!! YOU FUCKED IT UP!!!
I feel scared, what if the other guy can actually do the work, people will think I'm just stupid.:(((8 -
Estimates.. First, part of the team makes "high-level" estimates which are based on informal, incomplete, still-evolving specs and an unstable back-end. The project people report the estimates to the client and elevate the status of these inaccurate estimates to that of commitments.
Then, before the "sprint", we review our initial estimates *ahum commitments* in greater (technical) detail. Because there are still a lot of unknowns, we tend to estimate more buffer here (back-end is often not ready, always ping-pong between project people and dev-team about unclear specs, more work than originally expected, and often late modifications to the original spec).
When an estimate becomes more than 50% extra time at the "refinement", we are told: "sorry, we gotta do it in less" and when it doesn't work out, we're kindly asked to spend part of our weekend catching up at 100% pay rate (legally it's 150-200%).
FUCK THIS SHIT
*quotes used abundantly because these terms belong to "agile/scrum" terminology but we're only pretending -
Story of a first-time hackathon.
So, I took part in the COVID-19 Global Hackathon.
Long story short, I got excited at OCR and just went with the most challenging challenge - digitizing forms with handwritten text and checkboxes, ones which say whether you have been in contact with someone who could have Coronavirus.
And, unsurprisingly, it didn't work within 4 days. I joined up with 2 people, who both left halfway through - one announced, one silently - and another guy joined, said he had something working and then dissapeared.
We never settled on a stack - we started with a local docker running Tesseract, then Google Cloud Vision, then we found Amazon Textract. None worked easily.
Timezone differences were annoying too. There was a 15-hour difference across our zones. I spent hours in the Slack channel waiting.
We didn't manage the deadline, and the people who set the challenge needed the solution withing 10 days, a deadline we also missed. We ended up with a basic-bitch Vue app to take pictures with mock Amazon S3 functionality, empty TDD in Python and also some OCR work.
tbh, that stuff would've worked if we had 4 weeks. I understand why everyone left.
I guess the lesson from this is not to be over-ambitious with hackathons. And not to over-estimate computers' detection abilities.2 -
Our industry is filled with really smart people.
So how can we understand complex functional/OO programming, devops and all the rest of it. But not understand how to estimate something on a scale of difficulty and instead prefer to give a fixed estimate and be held to it31 -
How many standard drinks (or alcohol) is 4 CL of gin?
In most countries, a standard drink or alcoholic beverage is commonly defined as containing approximately 14 grams (0.6 ounces) of pure alcohol. This amount of alcohol is found in various quantities of different types of alcoholic beverages.
A typical shot of distilled spirits, like gin, is often around 1.5 ounces (44.3 ml), which is roughly 4 centiliters (CL). If we assume that the gin has an alcohol content of around 40% (80 proof), then the pure alcohol content in 4 CL of gin would be:
4 CL * 0.4 (alcohol content) = 1.6 CL of pure alcohol.
To convert this to standard drinks, which are typically based on 14 grams of pure alcohol, you would divide the amount of pure alcohol by the amount of alcohol in a standard drink:
1.6 CL / 14 grams = ~0.11 standard drinks.
So, approximately 4 CL of gin would contain about 0.11 standard drinks worth of alcohol. Keep in mind that alcohol content can vary between different brands and types of gin, so this is a rough estimate. It's always a good idea to refer to the label on the bottle for more accurate information.
Thanks, Chat GPT, i'm going to go ahead and drink 10 of these gin sodas and i'll only have had one standard drink!!!!
😂😂😂🤡🤡🤡
Happy friday ya'll4 -
When you ask me to estimate some project that is complex and you don't pay for an initial research process, my response will be full of assumptions.
I've kindly listed those assumptions for you, also sometimes referred to as Caveats.
When you don't read the assumptions and the issues arise outside of reasonable control - that means it's YOUR F'ING PROBLEM -
Any native iOS devs want to help me finish my app? It's a medical app and I estimate that I'm at least 70% done with it. But I guess since I'm supposed to be posting a rant WHY CAN'T I FIND ANYONE TO HELP ME?!4
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My team leader (Indian) asked me, in my second month in the job, to estimate the required time for testing some screens.
I made the estimations based on my experience and understanding of "screen testing" then discussed it with him and he accepted the estimations.
When the time came to start the task, he sent me a document about writing automation test for the screens,which was new thing to me.
The task took more than the estimations (3 times) and I have been blamed because I made wrong estimations.
The team leader was the one who blamed me!!!
Never estimate a task without full description...2 -
If i could estimate a schema issue. I looked at this site once in my time here. Don’t know shit about schema’s.
Estimating haha.
Im not asking you an estimate for example building a rocket. Right?
I don’t know this shit. -
So I'm going to have to give an estimate for how long this new project is going to take. It's about time I learn how to properly estimate projects. Or does the learning only happen with more experience? 🤔3
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What would you say to an employer offering a job at a starting point of only a percentage of the top salary you'll earn once the project is finished? Let's say they offered to pay you $40k to work full time building a highly complex website with multiple API integrations and sophisticated estimate calculation workflows, plus you'd be doing marketing and copywriting, with a goal of achieving 300 signups a day. In the middle of the project they boost the pay to, say, $60k salary rate. At the 12 month mark, which is the final "launch" date anticipated (and onward), you get $100k/year and you're the only person paid to do All The Things.
Oh, and also, the previous person they hired to do it failed to deliver and was let go.
Would you turn that down because to earn so little at first on the speculation that the venture will be a success and that you'll eventually get to the $100k level, plus their failure with the previous person, is too much of a gamble? Asking for a friend. ;)5 -
I have a client that I have done some freelance work for, he has been seeking investors to build out the whole system that he wants, he might have some willing investors now. I want to ask, what is the best way to make a cost estimate for a project that may span 2 or 3 years?10
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Estimate how long it will take you then double it. After that split the project into milestones and add the days you give a client to accept the milestone. If you have a good client you will get done early and refund them the difference. Otherwise you get paid well for dealing with a dumbass.
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You know, I don't mind getting dragged if I deserve it. But it would be nice to have ALL the information I need to make an estimate BEFORE you hang me out to dry.
First I was told that work on this issue could be kicked down the road since we were getting big contracts. The next day the issue was in the sprint.
I tell you I won't be able to get it done with the business critical stuff you said absolutely had to be done that sprint (turns out we had 3 months of leeway even before COVID). You say alright cool. We push it to next sprint. The next day you say we have been pushing that issue too much and we absolutely have to get it done this sprint. At least have it so QA can look at it by Tuesday.
I give a preliminary look to QA cuz I found a bug, but they can test other shit about this fucking issue, but then get shut down fucking again because it isn't code complete.
STOP. MOVING. FUCKING. GOAL POSTS. AND. GASLIGHTING. ME.
And as a bonus, I disagree with the necessity of this work in general. I think it's fucking stupid, unnecessary, and zero value added. It's a management jerkoff issue that is going to piss off all of our users.1 -
Spent many more hours than my estimate to get a project out the door. Client is now nitpicking everything. I know the client is always (usually) right but this feels ridiculous. His site is 20x faster than it ever was before but just one page is a little off _after adding more content_ and it's a crisis.1
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*weekly team planning session, my first week*
They: "We don't estimate on effort required, we estimate on the number of unknowns"
Me: "How do you know unknowns?"
They: "Exactly. Also, we don't account for 0 unknowns."
Me: "What if it's a simple text change?"
They: "There's always unknowns."2 -
How on earth are you supposed to deliver a precise estimate of assignments, when your client wants the assignments estimated in parts, but youre not able to split it into parts because its a chain of assignments, that cant be split, like if one Thing succeeds then its possible to move on to next part? So many unknowns because you have to set time aside for unknown code behavior.. Sigh..1
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Today i realized that i can convert MB and GB to the top of my head and generate a very good estimate.
Cant say that same when converting miligrams to grams.6 -
Just wondering on some agile best practices. Do you guys estimate efforts for defects? My PO is totally against it and says we deliver 5 to 7 pointers user stories + fix all the defects from previous sprint and current sprint, which I feel is over burdening the Dev team + in hurry to complete current sprint stories delivering poor quality work, which in turn become defects in the next sprint 😨 caught in this loop for a while now 😫4
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Client's WordPress powered site has gone down due to influx of traffic. Site is cached and whatnot, the server it's on is simply underpowered and not coping. Whilst I'm frantically trying to spin up new servers and load balance and get things back online, client keeps interrupting with emails like "URGENT - Website is down", "How long is this going to take please?", and "Hello! Do you know whats going on?!". I reply cordially to each, secretly growing increasingly enraged. "Yes I am already aware and working on it.", "Difficult to estimate, but I'm hoping no more than 20 minutes.", "Yes. I'm working on it.", "Yes, I know. I'm working on it."
And then I receive this gem: "Perhaps call Word press?"
AARRGGHHH
This scene from Clerks springs to mind: https://youtube.com/watch/...2 -
I let my monkey brain come up with a reasonable estimate after evaluating what is required. Then i just add in some random amount of time (If my estimate is around 3 days i just randomly say it'll take me 3 days, 3 hours, 21 minutes and 50 seconds). It usually cracks up people during meetings and ends up getting me more time because they like to round it up xD3
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Manager took too long to decide how he wants the new project.
- Estimate time for this project: 3 months
- Time I have to do it, 1 month.
YAY!! -
When you get asked for an estimate immediately after something is brought up for the first time...
...some time to process what you jist said would be nice. -
Always estimating for the best possible, quality solution. I refuse to write anything less than perfect. Also I estimate the time based on how I feel that day lol.7
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Got a change request today. The client had written two lines.
The first line(specs): we would another installation type something like "blabla"(an existing installation type).
The second line just ask for an time estimate...
They same client have been known to use mspaint as the visual aid of how they want things to look, and it looks ugly.
My reply for the CR: The time needed to complete the task is 5 hours + whatever amount of hours I find suitable. -
Depends on the project:
If it’s just me on the project 1.5x actual estimate which is based on whether or not I can figure it out from looking at the code.
If others are on it 3.5x to include things like getting others up to speed, discussions, design talks etc. -
PM comes into the bar and shouts:
- drinks for alll on me !
Then he faces three devs sitting in the corner and says:
- so what is the estimate of gaining currency for our fresh and innovatice project i have just started ? -
Suffering from the cash flow blues.
Remote contracting roles are far and few between, and so far I’ve only found the one client, the problem is that because they’ve been burned in the past by contractors, they only operate on an order by order basis.
So we’re stuck in this perpetual cycle of issues > estimates > order > development > test > tweak > pay and repeat.
The problem is that there is always significant delay between the stages from both sides, either because they’re busy on stuff, or I’ve burnt myself out rushing to meet an estimate and having to take a bit of breathing room.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great working in blocks of a few days to a week and then having some time to myself (and the money is nice too), but the cash flow inconsistency is super scary when you’re having to manage corporation tax, accountancy fees and a salary.
Anyone else have these issues / know good places to find remote contract work?2 -
Client needs a section of their current website redesigned and add some functionality based on user interaction with the website.
ac - account director
ac: Need timings on FE build for his section on the website.
me: Cool can I see the wireframes/designs?
ac: No wires yet, designs are here...
me: *sees 3 pages mocked up out of 50 different ones in this particular section, and they all have different functionalities*
me: I can only give you estimates on the designed bits
ac: Just estimate based on the UX proposal, it's here...
me: *reads first line - "Make F&Q section and sub pages more visual*
me: Tasks described in the proposal are too generic!
ac: Just estimate based on the previous work done for this client (which have nothing to do with the current scope)
me: *dies and goes to freelancer heaven*1 -
So my non-tech manager has started doing all the estimates for us developers on features upon high management request to save time, because of course rushing all the estimates for the work to be done in the next 6 months is the best process in software engineering.
All the estimates are based on previous work. Sometimes it will be accurate, but most of the time it is absolutely not.
So I get a task estimated to 3 weeks but I planned for 5. Just fit it in 3 weeks.
I planned for 2 weeks but the original estimate is 5. Just fit it in 5.
What kind of crap is that lol? What is the point of us estimating work if management knows apparently better than us how to design systems?
You guys got any similarly shitty project management system?1 -
I’d like to estimate I’d finish a project about after a week, or two if I’m accounting for major debugging.
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"Can you send me an estimate over the changes I'll be requesting peace-meal from you over the coming 4 days? And have the website ready next week?"
How about no? -
Has anybody experience with Scrum in small web development agencies? Especially estimating stories with story points instead of hours/days?
We have a new junior project manager, without any practical experience working agile, who wants to establish scrum because what he read about it sounded so good... I already worked agile with kanban before and I loved it, but I only have little experience with scrum.
I think scrum, or agile in general, won't work with the clients we have. Most of the time, our clients have a fixed deadline, a fixed budget (either money or time) and they know their requirements, so there is no much room for beeing agile.
Regarding story points, I just adding an unneccessary layer of abstraction, because the customer wants to know how long a specific feature takes. Sure, story points are just another, more dynamic unit for time, but then why nut estimate in static time unit in the first place? Another fear I have, is that some devs may be more ignorant regarding deadlines and expectations on customers side. "yeah I'm working for 10 days on this story, but it's 8 points!" instead of informing the project manager "Currently I spend 2 days on this feature, we estimated 3 days, but it seems I need 3 days more".
Maybe I shouldn't be worried, but it would be great if you could share your experience and learnings. Thanks in advance!14 -
How do you estimate cost for project in freelancing?
What would be your cost of simple app n website seprately?
Share your suggestions on full time freelancing4 -
So I am a back end developer, but the UI team seems to be taking forever to make front end pages with no front end display logic. Any vague estimates for a page with text boxes that calls an API to fill, and API to save?
*This is half serious wondering, half poking fun at vague estimate requests1 -
How do you guys actually estimate any given task..?? What do you consider..?? Or do you just guess it as per experience..??7
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Absolutely hate it when managers give an estimate for an hour tasks to be completed in 7 days.. why can't they just accept they are shit and ask for the effort estimation from the concerned dev.. all the AGILity goes in an awry..2
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Me and my study group have been developing a system for a company the last semester, but the system isn't done at the end of the semester (which is fine) and the company have mentioned that they want to pay us to finish the system.
The problem is that we have a very little knowledge about how much time it is going to take.
So what are we gonna say? It's pretty hard to calculate a price and estimate any time frame2 -
I usually work backwards trying to estimate time. Instead of asking "how long would it take me to do this?" I ask "could I get this done in X amount of time?" If the answer is yes, X-- and try again. This is how I get the absolute minimum amount of time I would need to get *something* done. Then I add a bit to that as a buffer.
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How I estimate work: Deep dive into the existing code, consider refactors and related modifications that may need to be done, look for alternatives, assess the scope, and then add 20% to whatever amount of time I come up with.
How every company I've ever worked for estimates work: "It's just adding a button. My nephew builds websites and he says buttons are easy. We need it in production by tomorrow."1 -
This tuesday I saw a really badly made PHP web application. Two actually. I was giving a time estimate for how long it would take to transfer these applications to our servers. While I was reading the code it became apparent that they had more security holes than Emmental cheese. Most views had obvious SQL-injection vulnerabilities and most probably XSS too. Although I didn't think too look for XSS in the moment. It just puzzled me that this bad code even exists.
But cherry on top was that the password wasn't checked at all. The login form was on the organization's website and was sent to the selected application. But the password wasn't checked in the application. And this was made by a real Finnish software development firm, like what the fuck.
Time to redo the applications I guess. Not like there's anything wrong in that if they pay for it.2 -
I wanted to make an android application to manage contacts. I asked a developer to estimate this 5 screens and he said 3 months and ₹1.2 Lakh ...... really!!3
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Asks me for time estimate on a project. I gives time estimate. "That's not exactly what I was asking for. It's more of a {{ MBA_term }}. I'll explain it to you shortly." Never explains it.
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Does anyone know other cheap text messages (SMS) providers such as https://www.smsapi.com?
Quantity approx. 200-1000 messages per day, hard to estimate. Main use is sign up and two-way authentication.
The ones I found so far all start at $0.10 (for Europe) and $0.04 (USA).3 -
1) Guess how many beans (hours) are in the jar (sprint).
2) Pad my estimate with 12 beans.
3) Be high and have to have meetings in which I explain bean counting is not an exact science and insist that meetings about how we count beans will only put us behind further and will never ever make us better bean counters.
or
3b) Be under, have extra time in the sprint, only to have product management fill the jar with more beans until I'm wrong again. -
In response to my previous rant:
You guys thought I'd have to redo my time estimate to my boss. I'm chill fam.
I just finished the code in about an hour of editing and testing.
Pic related, my face until the next time this thing breaks.
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Somebody working in Czech Republic, Prague can estimate how the job situation for a German autodidact backend developer would be? Looking for an opportunity in a new environment.
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