Hacker News Reader

Comment by m1gu3l | Hacker News Reader

anyone else feeling like lately at work they are spending more time on dialing in time estimates for work than actually doing the work? it feels like we have a problem (at least in sysadmin/devops roles) of valuing time estimates/"the process"/agile over actually banging out some work. i am starting to tune out planning meetings and requests for time estimates with a least effort possible attitude.

View on HN

I've had this problem before, it's a symptom of management not trusting development teams.

It's worse when combined with the "we say estimates aren't timeframes but secretly they are" problem: give a 3 day estimate for something, and when it's not finished in 3 calendar days (because only around 1/4 of that time was actually usable for work, the rest was pointless meetings or 20 minute gaps where nothing useful can be done), more meetings are scheduled to discuss why the estimates are "wrong".

For some bizarre reason, management has not yet assigned a task to their programmer underlings to automated themselves out of existence. I can't imagine why.

I don't think it's a matter of trust. Management sees their job as setting priorities and resource allocation. So they shoehorn that into everything they touch. They require estimates, so they can divide impact by effort and then assign the highest ratios first, without regard to necessity or dependencies or technical debt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com