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Comment by davewritescode | Hacker News Reader

I had a conversation that stuck with me a few years ago at a very large company about making proposals for future projects. I had a habit of making very detailed proposals, doing a great job making projections and being accurate about those projections.

A VP of engineering pulled me aside after he saw that one of my proposals wasn’t getting traction and told me “None of the people who are writing alternatives to your proposal are doing the analysis you are, that’s why they look better than yours”

I guess I had never considered that a lot of my peers were just inventing numbers to justify things they wanted and that there’s a careful balance that needs to be struck between “making shit up” and “detailed unbiased analysis”

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That's when you suggest that the historical accuracy of the proposals should be weighed to determine the degree of certainty in future proposals from various sources, right?

Let's say person A gives longer estimates but is accurate within 10% more than 95% of the time. Let's say person B gives estimates half as long, but the team runs over by 75% a quarter of the time and by 150% about half the time. Whose proposals should the stakeholders choose?

If your company is making decisions based on estimates, the accuracy trend on those estimates is a far more important metric than lines of code, number of commits, story points, or nearly any other metric they're keeping.

You'd need to be very strategic in how you point that stuff out. Because straight up saying that numbers from those people have been consistently wrong throws the people bringing them forth under the bus and it will make the people who you're giving the proposals to feel like you're telling them that they are doing a bad job at evaluating proposals given that they did give the final approval on all of them.

You're probably better off just playing the game and making up good sounding numbers. You're less likely to have half the company resenting you and making your life difficult.

ah the famous "give us dev estimates, but yours are too long, lets go with shorter anyway" makes people afraid to estimate high

If after the 3rd time that happens the boss doesn't notice, that's their fault.

>“None of the people who are writing alternatives to your proposal are doing the analysis you are, that’s why they look better than yours”

Oh wow. Boy have I been bitten by that before :(

It's what product is doing anyway, numbers are so often just made up to support a narrative.

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