And it’s management’s job to multiply the senior’s estimate by 5 and +/-50% for good measure. And even then, that’s a rough estimate at best.
Maybe using points for some planning actually works; I’ve never worked at a place that could use it for actual estimates. My estimates are entirely based on gut feel, my feeling of the complexity involved and my feeling of how much the team can get done. Over the last two years (since metastasizing into a CTO) my overall estimates have pretty much always been in the right ballpark. Which is to say, when the CEO says “We’re going to do X, Y, and Z this quarter,” I say “We’ll be able to reach about 50% completion if we work on all of those at the same time,” I’m usually more or less right.
I’ve never worked with a dev who could make significantly better estimates than me (excluding the early years of my career when my estimates were absolutely awful). Most of the devs I’ve worked with just wouldn’t give estimates; if pushed they’d be as vague as they possibly could. The only boss I’ve had who would give definite estimates was always off by an order of magnitude (as in he thought it would be 10x easier than it was, even though he had decades of experience writing code and managing teams).
Don’t ever go work for Amazon or any management that has ever drunk their koolaid.
I had a drastically underqualfied VP swoop in from Amazon to my team, and their whole style was to demand a deadline, then nitpick them if they didnt line up with whatever they seemed to want but wouldn’t tell us. They seriously would just hammer us for endless detail, then disregard any facts or figures that didn’t line up with their preferred deadline, which I can’t reiterate enough, they would never tell us.
They would also use endless Amazon jargon on us and not explain any of it, ever. You would ask what the jargon meant, and at best they would state its name, but then couldn’t define what it meant. They then got mad at us for not doing it “the amazon way” without giving us any guidelines about what that way was or even asking for it in the “amazon” way.
It was surreal, terrible, and of course non stop emergencies while cargo culting actual project planning.
Is senior’s job to multiply junior’s estimate by 3 before telling management.
And it’s management’s job to multiply the senior’s estimate by 5 and +/-50% for good measure. And even then, that’s a rough estimate at best.
Maybe using points for some planning actually works; I’ve never worked at a place that could use it for actual estimates. My estimates are entirely based on gut feel, my feeling of the complexity involved and my feeling of how much the team can get done. Over the last two years (since metastasizing into a CTO) my overall estimates have pretty much always been in the right ballpark. Which is to say, when the CEO says “We’re going to do X, Y, and Z this quarter,” I say “We’ll be able to reach about 50% completion if we work on all of those at the same time,” I’m usually more or less right.
I’ve never worked with a dev who could make significantly better estimates than me (excluding the early years of my career when my estimates were absolutely awful). Most of the devs I’ve worked with just wouldn’t give estimates; if pushed they’d be as vague as they possibly could. The only boss I’ve had who would give definite estimates was always off by an order of magnitude (as in he thought it would be 10x easier than it was, even though he had decades of experience writing code and managing teams).
Don’t ever go work for Amazon or any management that has ever drunk their koolaid.
I had a drastically underqualfied VP swoop in from Amazon to my team, and their whole style was to demand a deadline, then nitpick them if they didnt line up with whatever they seemed to want but wouldn’t tell us. They seriously would just hammer us for endless detail, then disregard any facts or figures that didn’t line up with their preferred deadline, which I can’t reiterate enough, they would never tell us.
They would also use endless Amazon jargon on us and not explain any of it, ever. You would ask what the jargon meant, and at best they would state its name, but then couldn’t define what it meant. They then got mad at us for not doing it “the amazon way” without giving us any guidelines about what that way was or even asking for it in the “amazon” way.
It was surreal, terrible, and of course non stop emergencies while cargo culting actual project planning.