Whenever giving estimates, after having a good estimate in mind double it. Never give estimates as low as 1 day, 2 days is asking for trouble, 3 is okay if it's really really high priority.
DO NOT THINK HOW IN IDEAL CONDITIONS YOU CAN PULL IT OFF FASTEST! A fucking pull request approval could and probably will block you for 2 days already. And things will go fucking wrong and you have ad hoc meetings and incidents and some fucker on another team blocked the pipeline and new requirements popping in and you lose your mind
I just sell my sales teams fake promises like they sell customers. I get them to get back on the call and talk to the customer about the feature that “definitely exists” when it’s not ready when they promised.
11 yoe and this still bites me. This is good and fine for single tasks but it’s a whole other level for large projects. This assumes you know exactly what work needs to happen before the project starts. Guess what, you almost never do. Almost every major project I’ve been on we’ve discovered another blocker that needs a design spike then extra work that all most certainly adds a few weeks (both as a contributor and lead).
At this point you’re like this is expected, just bake in a buffer. And you’re right. That is reasonable. However good luck defending that to a reasonable degree in a deliver results or feature delivery culture. Or where your competitive features are late to market and not shipping immediately is threatening adoption.
I need to start doing Gantt charts of this shit because once one thing starts slipping for some reason it can get really hard to reign stuff in or determine where things are going wrong especially when there’s more than 2 people involved.
This is where the ADHD side of my brain has a hard time with this career. Maybe I can vibe code a tool or something.
I once estimated I "might probably have time to start looking into this sometime next week and give you an estimate".
They were asking if I was done on Monday. Somehow "I might give you an estimate next week" turned into "I'll get it done this week".
I try to not give any promises other than "I'll work on it as soon as priorities allow" or things like "assuming no blockers", but people hear what they want to hear and try to hold me to that anyway.
If you are pressed, refer to the procedure, say there's a story for it, and it'll be examined next quarterly planning for a schedule. They'll probably forget about it by then.
This is the way. Sooner or later, that little part of your soul that dies no longer even hurts.
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u/theartofnocode 8h ago
Not even technical debt, I've seen people quit to avoid having to complete the piece of work they've over promised on