I don't know, an estimate spanning three orders of magnitude doesn't seem useful.
To continue your example of 5-7 days, it would turn into an estimate of 5-700 days. So somewhere between a week or two years. And fair enough, whatever you're estimating will land somewhere in between. But how do I proceed from there with actual planning or budget?
> But how do I proceed from there with actual planning or budget?
You make up the number you wanted to hear in the first place that ostensibly works with the rest of the schedule. That’s why engineering estimates are so useless - it’s not that they’re inaccurate or unrealistic - it’s that if we insisted on giving them realistic estimates we’d get fired and replaced by someone else who is willing to appease management and just kick the can down the road a few more weeks.
Your question is akin to asking ‘how do I make the tail to wag the dog?’
Your budget should be allocated for say 80% confidence (which the tool helpfully provides behind a switch) and your stakeholders must be on board with this. It shouldn’t be too hard to do since everyone has some experience with missed engineering deadlines. (Bezos would probably say 70% or even less.)
I mean it's no less useful than a more precise, but less certain estimate. It means you either need to do some work to improve your certainty (e.g. in the case of this quiz, allow spending more than 10 minutes or allow research) or prepare for the possibility that it's 700 days.
Edit: And by the way given a large enough view, estimates like this can still be valuable, because when you add these estimates together the resulting probability distribution narrows considerably. e.g. at just 10 tasks of this size, you get a 95% CI of 245~460 per task. At 20, 225~430 per task.
Note that this is obviously reductive as there's no way an estimate of 5-700 would imply a normal distribution centred at 352.5, it would be more like a logarithmic distribution where the mean is around 10 days. And additionally, this treats each task as independent...i.e. one estimate being at the high end wouldn't mean another one would be as well.
I organize them by the color, either rainbow-style or from darker to brighter.
> it wouldn’t be organised properly, I would struggle to find anything.
Libraries solve this with the Dewey Decimal Classification. Most people don't have enough books for it make sense though.
For me, I don't have that many paper books and the ones I own I know by the side and the color. I keep the books that I reference often in a separate place. I noticed I don't need to find all of the books, all of the time. So organize most of your books to look pretty.
You can also group similar books together on a single shelf and then order them by color. For example I have a dozen of cookbooks and those go on a separate shelf, arranged in a rainbow. I also have a book series that goes neatly together, so I keep them it grouped too.
I also organize my clothes like that too. By general category first (t-shirts, pants, socks, jackets), and then by color.
I used to be extremely messy too (piles of clothes and documents, cardboard boxes, you know the deal). I turned it around after I read the Marie Kondo book "The life-changing Magic of Tidying up". Then after I got the mess under control I look at the pictures for inspiration how to make it aesthetically pleasing. I got a lot of ideas from Pinterest (I know, I know), but you can do an image search or check the organization subreddits too.
That is such an awesome story! Immediate favorite for me. Can relate to typing in the code published in the gaming magazines. Mine was with memory-editing the game values, albeit not on Christmas.
I also cook and bake and I am using a mixer. And other tools too, like a food processor, a thermometer, scales, a dishwasher. Could I make do without them? Sure, as I have in the past. I understand my tools and how to apply them; I chop small amounts of ingredients and I don't wash my knives in a dishwasher. But I recognize the value of the tools. With them, my results are consistent and higher quality.
Plus, I have more time and energy for writing code later. Or other activities.
I admire consummate professionals who can immerse themselves in the craft. I can't do it. I still put out great work - definitely not the best ever - and the tools lessen my mental and physical burden. I have more energy that I can spend elsewhere.
We replaced the punchcards and terminals and line editors with different tools because the trade-offs were worth it. Maybe we can keep adapt new tooling in a similar matter when it makes sense.
> More importantly, Tony recognized the voice of “Daniel from Google” when it was featured in an interview by Junseth, a podcaster who covers cryptocurrency scams. The same voice that had coaxed Tony out of his considerable cryptocurrency holdings just days earlier also had tried to phish Junseth, who played along for several minutes before revealing he knew it was a scam.
> [...]
> Daniel told Junseth he and his co-conspirators had just scored a $1.2 million theft that was still pending on the bitcoin investment platform SwanBitcoin. In response, Junseth tagged SwanBitcoin in a post about his podcast on Twitter/X, and the CEO of Swan quickly replied that they caught the $1.2 million transaction that morning.
> Apparently, Daniel didn’t appreciate having his voice broadcast to the world (or his $1.2 million bitcoin heist disrupted) because according to Junseth someone submitted a baseless copyright infringement claim about it to Soundcloud, which was hosting the recording.
> The complaint alleged the recording included a copyrighted song, but that wasn’t true: Junseth later posted a raw version of the recording to Telegram, and it clearly had no music in the background. Nevertheless, Soundcloud removed the audio file.
DMCA enabling bad actors to cover their tracks was not on my bingo list.
You mean besides literally all the times when people upload raw copyrighted movies and music to YouTube? DMCA is boring and un-newsworthy when it's working properly. (Unless you're the type who thinks copyright is inherently wrong, but it would then be very silly to ask if DMCA was ever "used in a manner".)
> It also frustrates me to no end that people are so deeply incurious. This seems to only happen in tech
This doesn't match my observations. In many fields, training is limited and hides the details. We train workers to repeat specific tasks and they excel at them. But they don't have conceptual understanding. Any explanation of why things are done the way they are is surface-level. You can see it when a procedure fails for some reason. They way to deal with is to 1) do basic checks 2) try again and if it still fails 3) delegate to someone else. Nobody is going to troubleshoot or optimize tasks unless that's their main job.
It happens in construction, in the kitchens, on the assembly lines, and in the offices. It happens because it gets the job done.
There are a lot of developers who learn how to do a task and never question whether the task could be automated, either away or to reduce errors. They just do the same mundane task four hours a week in perpetuity.
That’s the part that frustrates me. Your job is to automate things. So why aren’t you automating things?
You're right. My wording was flat-out wrong, and I apologize. A more accurate sentiment (IMO) would be "that this happens in tech is baffling, considering..."
Yes, but in most fields, conceptual understanding doesn't matter for most tasks.
That's the problem with software. A brick-layer doesn't need to understand structural stability, but in software every task is structure validation, and people expect brick-layers to be productive.
> A brick-layer doesn't need to understand structural stability
Maybe a “junior” brick layer doesn’t need to, as much as a junior engineer doesn’t need to understand the ins and outs of their language. But a senior brick layer, or an architect, needs to understand more of the details so that they can set out the plan for the junior.
> Yossi's post about how an unusually unreasonable person can have outsized impact in a dimension they value at their firm also applies to impact outside of a firm. Kyle Kingsbury, mentioned above, is an example of this. At the rates that I've heard Jepsen is charging now, Kyle can bring in what a senior developer at BigCo does (actually senior, not someone with the title "senior"), but that was after years of working long hours at below market rates on an uncertain endeavour, refuting FUD from his critics (if you read the replies to the linked posts or, worse yet, the actual tickets where he's involved in discussions with developers, the replies to Kyle were a constant stream of nonsense for many years, including people working for vendors feeling like he has it out for them in particular, casting aspersions on his character, and generally trashing him). I have a deep respect for people who are willing to push on issues like this despite the system being aligned against them but, my respect notwithstanding, basically no one is going to do that. A system that requires someone like Kyle to take a stand before successful firms will put effort into correctness instead of correctness marketing is going to produce a lot of products that are good at marketing correctness without really having decent correctness properties (such as the data sync product mentioned in this post, whose website repeatedly mentions how reliable and safe the syncing product is despite having a design that is fundamentally broken).
I'm sorry, this is too much for me. I don't understand what this paragraph is about. Too many abstract nouns; "correctness" lost its meaning for me. If this is a parody or a joke, then it flew way over my head. Was it supposed to recreate "a constant stream of nonsense"? If so, it missed the mark.
To continue your example of 5-7 days, it would turn into an estimate of 5-700 days. So somewhere between a week or two years. And fair enough, whatever you're estimating will land somewhere in between. But how do I proceed from there with actual planning or budget?
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