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Comment by gilbetron | Hacker News Reader

> management is right to ask for estimates

Why? They are always wrong. Asking for a plan? Sure, because planning makes you think through things. Planning good, plans bad, to paraphrase. But estimates are always wrong and always useless, dev with 30+ years experience and I've never met anyone that can actually estimate software except in the trivial sense.

The error bar on software estimates, like solving a math problem (because they are the same thing! If you don't think so, you don't understand software), is infinite.

Although I like your quote that "conflict itself is not a sign of badness".

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Why? Because there are often other dependencies going on. Most software in this paradigm is at a company. When companies roll out new things, change management has to happen. Marketing needs to make a splash (they want at least 6-12 weeks lead time). Sales starts making promises. Account managers and support need to be trained. Change management has to to happen. So then missing a date by weeks/months screws up the business. Most companies aren't writing software for fun.

Sorry, buy have to disagree. Management broadly (program or business managers and related workers) are not always wrong or wrong to ask. Nor is it waste to try. It's exactly this kind of fixed belief which drives behavior that ultimately runs the big risks. Not sure deeper meaning buy seeing this kind of interaction is a game, stupid game, or good idea by innocent if stupid people is exactly the kinds of things that work against team cohesiveness. Software isn't 6-sigma manufacturing so the best kind of predictive work that applies there doesn't work for us, but even they know good cross functional coordination is about a whole lot more than error bars. The book will give clarity and depth this forum won't permit. The inability to perfectly plan does not advocate for the "trust me model" from programmers.

While the worst case might be infinite, the average case is a lot less bad than that, and knowing whether something will take 2 hours, 2 days, or 2 weeks is important for prioritizing work. Maybe that one new column in the query isn't so important if it'll take 2 weeks, but if it's only 2 hours then let's get it now.

The error bars on solving a math problem (or writing a program, or anything else) are not infinite unless you make the mistake of stretching them to the point of encompassing absolute certainty that a solution is found.

Almost no software development task is like proving or disproving P=NP: often, they are like homework problems. And, like uninspired homework problems, it is often a matter of grinding through a process with all due attention to the details.

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