>>The engineer's boss, an engineering manager, asks him how long a new task will take to complete. Sometimes the engineer has not done this particular thing before, so he responds honestly that he has no idea how long it will take. His boss will not accept that answer. He asks again. So, the engineer makes a wild guess and his boss responds with, "That's too long." Even if the engineer knows how long a task will take to complete and gives a realistic estimate, his boss often responds with, "That's too long. You have until Friday." When the engineer asks how long his boss has known about the task, the boss says he has known for a month. When the engineer asks why he didn't tell him a month ago, the boss just looks at the engineer like he doesn't understand the question.
If this describes your workplace, please find a better managed workplace if you can. They are out there
The correct way to do things here would be to:
1. Do a probe project to evaluate complexity and/or look at similar projects
2. Trade time (deadlines) for scope and resources. Yes, we can deliver in a month, but only if we cut scope and get 2 more QA folks, etc.
EDIT 2a: You can also negotiate to trade time for quality and/or take on technical debt knowing it reduces future velocity.
3. If neither of the above happen, you should trade absurdity for more salary/growth. I've seen this at places such as hedge funds and consultancies and they compensate and "pay" for it with better comp and growth.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. The article seems to be written by someone who has not yet learned the life lesson that "everything is a negotiation".
There's no such thing as a hard deadline. Everything is made up. What your manager is saying is: "To be successful in the market, I think I need to have X thing in Y days."
It's the engineer's responsibility to provide information and estimates that will shape the business's direction. If you don't clarify or negotiate requirements based on your technical knowledge and experience and just take requirements as law written in stone you are not providing the true value of an engineer.
If you are doing that - pushing back and grounding requirements in reality - and the business plows ahead with unrealistic goals anyway, then that simply means the people you work with are unreasonable and you should seek employment elsewhere. If they're not even willing to listen to people they're paying to have expertise then they're probably reading the market wrong too and I wouldn't trust them to be around long anyway.
There's no such thing as a hard deadline. Everything is made up.
"This video processing software needs to be ready by the Superbowl" or "This electronic voting software needs to be done by election day" don't strike you as hard deadlines?
Often this video processing software wasn’t ready by the Superbowl, and this electronic voting software wasn’t completed by election day.
You don’t get sacked, you just get to work on the next death-march project. And for your two examples, it might be punted to the next Superbowl or election.
I guess that depends on your definition of "hard". Will the world end if you don't meet that regulatory deadline? No. Will the company survive? Maybe. Will you lose your job? Maybe. Are there other jobs for you? Yes.
When we can't change the deadline, it's obvious that we should shift the scope. If that breaks down, the problem becomes not losing your entire engineering team while the deadline looms.
This reads more like the"engineering manager" has had a sales role for too long. I think most frequently this is at the VP level.
The direct eng manager (or PM sometimes) should be in a position to fight against this sort of absurdity, give the IC a few days to scope the project, etc. One of the eng managers at a previous employer wasnt a great technical mind but was stellar at playing defense against managament. We all had great respect for him repeatedly taking it on the chin for his team.
Yeah, anyone who knows about a deadline for a project for a month and hasn't bothered scoping it or estimating with their team is massively failing at their job.
Most tech companies are set up such that managers are not incentivized to play defense for their team. Managers switch teams too often (usually on an annual cycle). Teams get reorganized almost as often. Managers have to please their boss or someone higher up.
The power the engineers have is to exit. In some organizations, the engineers can exit to another part of the organization. In others, they exit the organization entirely. This does actually work in aggregate if you just look at it on a longer timescale.
Number 2 is very important and not obvious. Give your manager options to choose from. It makes you a cooperative problem solver rather than someone who is pessimistic and can't manage deadlines. Shrugging and saying that scope management is the manager's job is equally as bad as the manager shrugging and saying implementation is the dev's job.
In some ways, that might be a good situation -- it means they are leaving all the trade-off decisions to you. If they are only specifying time and resources, you can trade scope, quality, debt.
If they are freezing time and resources and scope, and you dont have much room to move except with quality and debt. But those catch up. If that is the consistent trade-off, i'd go with my original recommendations: trade this stupidity for more salary or find a new employer with better management. Or seek the managerial position yourself and do a better job at it.
If this doesn't work, then I think the most important thing is to implement the most simplistic basic solution as fast as possible and then explicitly ask for feedback. Hard-code whatever portions that take time, but you're not worried about (e.g. database portions). Focus on the parts that are vague that you don't understand and provide a _concrete_ realization of the those vague ideas. This shifts decision-making responsibility away from you.
As a plus this also gives you the ability to more effectively gauge the difficulty of the rest of the project. The things you thought were simple might be much worse. And then as long as you get concrete feedback, you'll be able to much better predict the amount of time and effort required going forward.
I just said, I'll need to work Saturdays to make this happen, and will need at least 2 others in on Saturdays (in office - full day work). I asked for +50% and got it.
It helped I'd been clear that my schedule was 8:30-5:00 M-F to start and was younger at the time.
Ironically - these days I just wish I had free time and curse myself fairly often for being over-committed. So rarely worth it even for more $ especially if you have kids and are a stranger to them. While I'm paid extremely well QOL is WAY down and stress is very high.
> If neither of the above happen, you should trade absurdity for more salary/growth. I've seen this at places such as hedge funds and consultancies and they compensate and "pay" for it with better comp and growth.
My recommendation: try to evaluate your employer on the above.
I've traded stupidity for money for money earlier in my life, and it made sense. But people underestimate the break-even. You deserve a lot of money (50% or 75% premium) for some of the stupidity I've seen.
On the flip side, i've also traded a salary discount for a well-run org -- a job where i have 90min max meetings a day with lots of good ASYNC communications, good project planning, estimation, and good sprint cadences. I work a lot, but only when I want to (often late nights), bike outside when I want to, work heads-down w/o disturbances, etc.
Just be careful when headhunters come offering a 10 or 15% increase in comp except w/ a very different culture. You have to compare like to like.
> My recommendation: try to evaluate your employer on the above.
And better do it in a nuanced way, not the yes/no checkmarks that Stackoverflow Jobs is using for those points. I've worked for companies that were a mess and would get 11/12, as they _technically_ were using source control and tracking bugs etc., just in the most unproductive/useless way.
> I've worked for companies that were a mess and would get 11/12, as they _technically_ were using source control and tracking bugs etc., just in the most unproductive/useless way.
Why can't engineers simply tell managers that it can't be done by the specified deadline? Why do managers even ask this question if they're gonna ignore the answer and impose an impossible deadline anyway?
It looks like they're assuming we're all lazy. They think the job isn't that hard. A fundamental lack of respect.
> Why can't engineers simply tell managers that it can't be done by the specified deadline
They can. I've had a time where a project manager came by no less than 3 times asking me to re-estimate the same project, tweaked ever so slightly each time. Turned out that they had made an impossible promise to the client. Upon learning that, I just said, listen that can't be done within that budget, end of story. You have to go reduce the scope. In the end, they had to go back, loop in the account manager and have the awkward conversation with the client.
Perhaps some managers think they are a clever Cpt Kirk who's gotten wise to their Scotty's miracle-worker tactics, even though they're a manager with an honest Geordi La Forge.
Because in majority of the case engineers after manage to hit the deadline. That is managerial experience. What management learns over time is that engineers say it is impossible but if you insist they will then do it.
It is by trading quality pretty often, but that often is exactly trade off managers want. It is often by trading future productivity - engineers burning out or at least having drop after deadline.
> It is often by trading future productivity - engineers burning out or at least having drop after deadline.
Future productivity? If engineers are burning out in an attempt to meet otherwise impossible deadlines, it means they're being placed under enough stress that it's threatening their mental and possibly physical health. Is employee health really something that can be traded away?
> Is employee health really something that can be traded away?
In theory? No. In practice? Very much yes.
Health (particularly mental well-being) isn't readily and reliably quantifiable. As a manager, you may think your subordinate is happy and productive all the way up to the point they hand you their resignation letter. Meanwhile, employees have every reason to pretend everything is OK up to the very moment they secure a new job elsewhere. And to the extent they're becoming less productive due to burnout, most software jobs has a lot of slack in it - between high variance in problem solving and plenty of bullshit tasks to juggle, someone working at 10% of their normal capacity can stay unnoticed for a while.
With no good feedback being available, it's hard to see you're putting too much pressure on your employees, particularly if you don't look for it (whether because you're too busy or just don't care).
> As a manager, you may think your subordinate is happy and productive all the way up to the point they hand you their resignation letter.
This is the same problem we have with depression and suicide. The answer is to actively look for it.
> Meanwhile, employees have every reason to pretend everything is OK up to the very moment they secure a new job elsewhere.
An evaluation of a person's mental health produces medical information which should of course be confidential. People will not open up if they think this information will be shared with others, especially their bosses or colleagues.
> And to the extent they're becoming less productive due to burnout, most software jobs has a lot of slack in it - between high variance in problem solving and plenty of bullshit tasks to juggle, someone working at 10% of their normal capacity can stay unnoticed for a while.
Many diseases also have a subclinical phase where they show few or no symptoms. This is actually a good thing since it allows you to intervene before a complication manifests itself. The answer is to actively look for them.
> it's hard to see you're putting too much pressure on your employees, particularly if you don't look for it (whether because you're too busy or just don't care).
Hard, but not impossible. The answers won't be found if the people responsible aren't looking for them. If managers are too busy, maybe they should make the time. If they don't care, they should straight up be fired for gross negligence.
> An evaluation of a person's mental health produces medical information which should of course be confidential. People will not open up if they think this information will be shared with others, especially their bosses or colleagues.
How would this information be useful if it's not shared with the boss?
Regardless, I don't think the biggest issue is people are afraid that the information will be shared, but that there's a stigma around being associated with a mental health issue that causes lower productivity in the workplace. Employees are more likely to keep that kind of thing a secret because they likely believe knowledge of it will make it harder to get raises and promotions.
> How would this information be useful if it's not shared with the boss?
Indirection and anonymization. The details of each individual aren't supposed to be shared but a healthcare professional can recommend changes to the manager that if implemented would promote a healthier workplace. They can point out that the whole workplace is stressful and talk to the managers about how they can improve that. Hopefully deadlines will be addressed.
There's an entire medical specialty devoted to this: occupational medicine.
> Employees are more likely to keep that kind of thing a secret because they likely believe knowledge of it will make it harder to get raises and promotions.
Unreasonable deadlines are likely to stress entire groups of people, not single individuals. It's worth addressing as an issue affecting the collective workforce.
> Is employee health really something that can be traded away?
Practically yes. Not necessary because management are all sociopaths and narcissists (some are). What management see is well performing motivated employee that does not complain. People are expected to not talk about about them being tired, about their mental issues and put themselves at disadvantage if they show weakness.
Employees in order to look good and for the sake of own ego, dont admit they are at limit. The ego thing is big co-reason, that is what prevents employee from taking action. (And yes employee often has that option.)
When employee breaks and stops performing, he is kept around for the sake of old glory for a while. Then he is either replaced or hidden in one of those sleepy corporate departments full of considered loosers. The employee is then blamed for consequences of break down.
Managers don't operate like this at well-run companies.
Any remotely healthy team will perform estimation and scoping as a discussion with the developers involved. The author of this post sounds like he has worked at an extremely dysfunctional company, not a company that understands how to develop software.
This idea that managers are universally incompetent just isn't true. The best thing you can do is refuse to support incompetent managers. Change teams or change jobs if you must. There are many, many great managers out there who won't try to pull nonsense like this.
I also noticed that the author is in a bias, this is not a problem of the "software companies", this is a problem of "some software companies" that have a very bad administration, lack of experience in the industry or who intend to apply a disguised labor exploitation
I would also read books by steve mcconnell. The book on software estimation is awesome with respect to schedule. Just taking the quiz at the beginning of the book is eye-opening.
What's supposed to be the take-away from this? Is it to prove that knowing one or two bits of trivia and maybe a formula, by rote, can make your (unaided) estimation of related things vastly more accurate? That's all I'm getting from it, but maybe that's what's intended.
Examples: if I didn't happen to have an accurate-enough figure for the diameter of the Earth in miles, plus a formula for the surface area of a sphere, plus roughly the proportion of the Earth's surface that's land, all in my head, there's no chance at all I could produce a useful-for-any-purpose-whatsoever estimate of "area of the Asian continent" without researching it (at which point I could just look up a fairly exact figure, without knowing any of that). Year of Alexander the Great's birth, well I happen to know roughly when Aristotle was active and that they were alive at the same time. Otherwise, again, I'd produce a useless-for-most-any-purpose guess. Total US currency, I bet knowing something like the current annual GDP of the US would at least narrow that down, and is something someone might plausibly have at hand (I don't, my guessed range on that would be hilariously bad). If you have a sense of blockbuster movie budgets and/or returns, which one can acquire from paying attention to entertainment headlines, it's easy to come up with a reasonable range for Titanic's box office receipts. And so on.
Is the point that trivia's highly valuable, actually, if you have to estimate a bunch of arbitrary stuff purely from memory?
You're supposed to put down ranges such that you have a 90% confidence that the correct answer is in that range, and then can expect to get roughly 9 of them "correct" (that is, the actual correct answer is included in your range).
The point of the test -- as shown by the response graph after it -- is to show that when someone asks us for a 90%-confidence estimate, we don't really understand what that means, and end up giving 30%-confidence estimates. The point is that people need to understand what they do and don't know, and reflect their level of uncertainty with the width of the range.
If I have a trivial task that I've done a hundred times before, I might say that it'll take me 45-60 minutes to complete, and 90% of the time I'd be right. But if it's something I've never done before, and I don't understand the steps or complexity, I might say that it'll take me between 30 minutes and 8 hours.
This scales up, too. For a larger project that I understand well, I might say 6-8 weeks, while for something I don't understand, I might say 4-12 weeks.
Over time, I can determine if I make good-enough estimates by checking to see if 90% of the time the actual time to delivery fell within the stated range. It doesn't matter if it's at the beginning of the range, end of the range, or right in the middle. I just need to hit somewhere in the range, 90% of the time.
For example, for the Alexander the Great question, I don't have a clue. Your mention that he was a contemporary of Aristotle actually made me realize I believed he was much more modern-day than he is. So I might give a range of like 1000BC to 0AD, because I recall that Aristotle was definitely BC, but I don't really have much confidence as to when. Looks like the right answer is 356BC. So my estimate was correct, even though it had a wide range. Giving people (like your manager) a wider range also communicates your uncertainty, which is a useful piece of information for them to have. The issue is that I think many engineering managers simply won't accept a true 90% estimate if it's wider than they know what to do with from a planning perspective.
Yeah, I get that and name narrower ranges in a business context (trying to keep the upper bound from getting too much lower) because most biz-school types don't get that, and tend to think you're full of shit, being passive-aggressive or otherwise deliberately obtuse, or else it doesn't actually matter and they just wanted a happy number to put on a powerpoint and now you're making their life more difficult for no reason.
For that matter they tend to be pretty bad at anything even adjacent to experimental design, but god help you if you point out that the data they're so proud to present to the C-suite next week is, actually, meaningless (rare is the C-suite that'll catch it and call them on it, anyway, so from the perspective of the presenter it's almost beside the point; a disturbing amount of "data driven" leadership is pure fairy dust).
For a good proportion of programmers I'd expect education and professional work experience to have them comfortable with wide estimate ranges being typical and honest for many "90%" estimates, but business-social experience having convinced them, correctly, that honest estimates aren't what a hell of a lot of people actually want and do, "make us appear ignorant or incompetent" (from the book), in actual fact from the perspectives of people who control our budgets and wages.
Yeah, I definitely agree that the business types just don't get it. If you give a wide range, they either think you're messing with them, or are incompetent.
Personally I tend to try to narrow the range as much as possible while keeping my upper bound as fixed as possible, but that doesn't always work either, and I think I still unconsciously try to go too far toward making everyone happy, and underestimate.
I think part of it is just our collective feelings of powerlessness that keeps us in this uncomfortable position. If a significant number of developers were to put their foot down and give real estimates that actually express uncertainty properly, and stick with them, management would start to understand, or at least accept, what's going on. But "getting a bunch of random people to change their behavior all at once" isn't a reliable strategy, so here we are, and here we'll continue to be.
To make things a bit more fair I'd definitely allow that plenty of business-types do get it, but I think enough don't that treating them all like they do before you know them fairly well is probably a bad move, career-wise, especially if you're not senior and important-enough to thrive despite pissing some of them off. Enough either don't understand or don't want honest estimating that the best you can really do is play the game wisely and hope it goes OK, until/unless you develop a rapport with a "good" one. I'd further admit that being one of the "good" ones may not actually be that useful in a business-type, overall, especially so far as their personal career prospects. They're just... to be approached differently.
The quiz asks for a range that will include the correct answer 9/10 times. Not a point estimate. If you don't have the relevant trivia in your head, broaden the range proportionally. I think the intended point is that we're bad at judging probabilities. Getting 100% right (within range) is probably supposed to be as concerning as getting 0% right.
Ah, right, I've always taken that effect in software estimation to be a result of business people hating how wide an actual "90% accurate" estimate is. Not many managers will accept "8 to 30 months" as a 90% estimate at the start of a project with a fairly typical set of unknowns. Especially they seem to really hate ranges that aren't quite a lot narrower than the size of the lower bound. But maybe it's actually driven by the people doing the estimating.
For my part I definitely tend to squeeze my "90%"s down to more like "30-40%" when asked for a "90%", for that reason. I might try out an honest and accurate estimate on someone I kinda know, and suspect won't quietly re-evaluate me as a useless moron or "one of those asshole 'programmer' types who doesn't get business" in response, though.
I'm a manager who has to speak directly to paying customers about how long they have to wait to get what they paid for and even I will never give a deadline or date. Most customers are actually pretty reasonable and know you can't predict everything. Most are thoroughly aware of how terrible they are at giving clear direction. It's important as a leader to exactly why things take time or why timing is unclear. Risks, uncertainty, quality takes time. There's also plenty of things you can do as a manager to de-risk a delivery and avoid being bottlenecked by risky tasks. It's also much easier (not easy, but easier) to estimate larger buckets of tasks than individual ones knowing that some will be harder than expected and some will be faster.
I feel like large companies see developers/engineers like a commodity, give them a spoon and tell them to move a mound of sand. As soon as you tell them you have a shovel, they'll say... well we have spoons, we've always used spoons and you need to continue to use a spoon. We have managers and vendors that take them out golfing that we pay millions of dollars to and we signed a 5 year contract to use spoons, so use a spoon.
If this describes your workplace, please find a better managed workplace if you can. They are out there
The correct way to do things here would be to:
1. Do a probe project to evaluate complexity and/or look at similar projects
2. Trade time (deadlines) for scope and resources. Yes, we can deliver in a month, but only if we cut scope and get 2 more QA folks, etc.
EDIT 2a: You can also negotiate to trade time for quality and/or take on technical debt knowing it reduces future velocity.
3. If neither of the above happen, you should trade absurdity for more salary/growth. I've seen this at places such as hedge funds and consultancies and they compensate and "pay" for it with better comp and growth.