
Most project managers ignore a huge aspect of task estimation - cesaroach
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-project-managers-ignore-huge-aspect-task-maioli-mackeprang
======
hga
If they view us as interchangeable cogs, why wouldn't they view the
technologies we use in much the same way?

This was a big problem with healthcare.gov's launch, the CMS (government) had
had success in a previous project with a particular non-relational database,
and made the contractor use it, despite I'm sure essentially none of their
people knowing it, and probably few if any even knowing the database's
paradigm. I wonder how many "estimates" the contractor was required to supply
to the government based on this....

(Although perhaps a bigger database problem initially was that it was severely
underprovisioned, emphasized by how _extremely_ specific they were about the
hardware it was moved to.)

------
tdb7893
This seems to be an over-engineered solution to this problem. In my experience
developers do pretty well balancing picking up unfamiliar technologies with
doing things that they already know well. This really only make sense to me if
you don't allow developers to choose what tasks they work on themselves.

~~~
hga
_This really only make sense to me if you don 't allow developers to choose
what tasks they work on themselves._

Which is nearly universal, in my experience which is now quite stale, and from
the many current reports we hear about the horrors of closed allocation in the
field. I keep thinking back to the hardware engineer who was also pretty good
at Python who was hired by Google, who then make him write Python hardware
testing code. Not wanting to end his primary career, he of course had to quit
ASAP.

See also "micro-management", especially I'll add by managers who are failed
software developers, which was an all too common thing back when I was in the
workforce (through spring 2004).

