Michele Sabatier
ADHD JesseAsking me to estimate how long something will take is like asking me to guess how many gumballs are in the jar, but I can’t see the jar.
THIS ACCOUNT HAS MOVED@adhdjesse just say "four" without specifying units
muxauy 🚴🇪🇺@noplasticshower @adhdjesse just give time estimates in gumballs
Jon Jennings@adhdjesse "I'll be able to tell you how long it will take when I'm 95% of the way through"
Best I can often offer is "tell me how long you want me to spend investigating before I come back to you with a status report"
Best I can often offer is "tell me how long you want me to spend investigating before I come back to you with a status report"
Krisztina Hirth@jonjennings @adhdjesse this is the only important question 👍. How much is it worth to you? If you can't afford to wait for me to build a proper solution we should not start it at all.
@yellowbrickc @adhdjesse
Taken me a while to educate account managers that "Need you to fix X for this client, there's 0.75hrs on the ticket" doesn't work unless they want to tell me what line the bug is on first :)
Taken me a while to educate account managers that "Need you to fix X for this client, there's 0.75hrs on the ticket" doesn't work unless they want to tell me what line the bug is on first :)
Carlos Gonçalves 🇧🇷
@adhdjesse for this question I learned the proper response with Mr Bull from Peppa Pig: It'll take as long as it takes.
Michael Wyman@adhdjesse @kyleve I particularly love being held to any such estimate after multiple rounds of requirements changes.
argonaut@adhdjesse @codinghorror don’t even know what a gumball is, so the example is even more aptly accurate for me…
@adhdjesse @codinghorror btw I think I read once that the most accurate way to estimate is to come up with a value, then double it, and then move it up one order of magnitude.
I still do it, and I still miss by a fathom…
Jeff Atwood@argonaut @adhdjesse I can't recommend this book enough. It is old but so good and really timeless: https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-long-would-it-take-if-everything-went-wrong/
How Long Would It Take if Everything Went Wrong?
I'm currently reading Steve McConnell's new book, Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735605351/codihorr-20]. The section on individual expert judgment provided one simple reason why my estimates are often so horribly wrong:> If you ask a developer to estimate a set of
@codinghorror what makes my estimation case unabashedly impossible is that I’m a designer, but I’d still give the book a try since I love optimizing (which is mostly solving puzzles others can’t).
bwaz@adhdjesse You clearly forgot to put a breakthrough onto your schedule. Newby error.
MudMan@adhdjesse Man, I know this is meant to be funny, but my producer brain is now going into all the conversations I've had to have about this in autopilot. It's gonna be doing that all day.
"I get it, just tell me what you think would be unreasonably fast or slow to expect"
"It's fine, we need a place to start, we'll revise this as we go".
"OK, let's break it down into smaller taks and estimate THOSE"
Don't make me turn this thread around and say "bigger than a breadbox". Because I will.
Dobviews@adhdjesse 72 Blue, 88 red, 61 yellow, 48 purple, 63 pink, 31 orange and 22 green. You owe me $192.50 in quarters. lol
"Still can't believe gumballs are 50 cents each now! Yeesh!"
ck@adhdjesse dont worry its somewhere between 1 and 100 times as many gumballs as last time
Mark Wieczorek@adhdjesse Just take the geometric mean of all jar sizes, estimate the number of gumballs that fit in it, and divide by two. Then add this number to your time estimate in minutes.
gnate@adhdjesse
You could just work out the refresh rate of the jar....
You could just work out the refresh rate of the jar....
Daveography 🇨🇦
I try to give estimates in confidence intervals: I'm 50% confident it can be done in x time, 60% in y, etc.
As a bonus, the more granular your intervals, the sooner the person asking loses interest and leaves you alone to actually do the work.