Hacker News Reader

Comment by ktRolster | Hacker News Reader

The guy in your link did lousy routefinding, and estimated that he could walk 40 miles a day. Anyone with experience backpacking can tell you that's a ridiculous pace (for a group, one mile an hour is a good pace). Plenty of people plan out long hikes with accurate estimations.

View on HN

But remember you're doing something novel so you've never hiked before, and so you can only estimate how much you can do each day. You may have done other travels but never walked that distance. Even if you half the speed you'll still be way off. And this is just 400 miles, what about a walk that across the whole US? Can you predict that Susie on your team will fall ill for a few week. How many meetings will management need? What about feature changes? How much time do do you have to estimate? So you have months to plan out your walk? Most projects need estimates within minutes to hours. And so on...

But remember you're doing something novel so you've never hiked before

You're not a novice programmer, you've done it before. And if you are a novice hiker, you shouldn't be doing it alone.

You've built a custom system with the exact same business requirements that connect to the exact same different sub systems, api, etc? It may be the same programming language and general framework but that's only a small part of most projects ;)

You've built a custom system with the exact same business requirements that connect to the exact same different sub systems, api, etc?

Similar enough that I can make good estimates. You can too, with experience.

Can you predict that Susie on your team will fall ill for a few week.

I can tell you, if you have a relatively long project, it's worse than that: Susie (or someone else) will probably quit. Better take that into your estimate calculation.

Remember, estimates are an outer bound; if you finish early, that's ok.

Then you go off and walk for a day and time how long it takes you. Now you can go back and have some clue about how long it will take. Bonus points for expecting to get faster over time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com