▲ | DennisP 6 days ago | |
I wouldn't advocate "super-inflated" estimates but within reason, there are long-term benefits if you go about it right. Where I mostly worked, managers cared about deadlines they could tell to external clients, which they really hated to miss. Early on, I didn't realize that, and gave my best guess. If I guessed the correct median, I was missing it 50% of the time, and managers kept getting mad at me. So I switched to estimates I could meet 90% of the time, and on the slow 10% I worked extra hours to meet my estimate anyway. Managers were happy. If I told them it would be done by Tuesday, it would be done by Tuesday. But it had enormous benefits beyond that. In almost 90% of cases, I had free time. Sometimes I'd admit to finishing early, but I also used that time to clean up technical debt, automate the tedious parts of my job, or advance my skills. After a while, I could give estimates as short as my old 50% estimates, and still beat them 90% of the time because I'd made my tasks so much easier. Less technical debt also meant the resulting code was less likely to have bugs. After a while, it seemed to me that all the other devs were overworked and I had it easy. But management gave me raises, and when they got in a jam, I was the guy they called on to bail them out. | ||
▲ | interactivecode 6 days ago | parent [-] | |
Being reliable is very valuable for the company. Better for you, better for the company. Unrealistic deadlines is bad for everyone involved. Especially for day to day work |