I recently estimated a task would take 30 minutes.
It took 40 minutes to do that estimate.
But, TBF, several important decisions were made during the process of estimating, such as what should be excluded from the task, basic organization, and some research.
BTW the task being estimated was doing time estimates for a project (which came out to be 2-3 weeks).
> I recently estimated a task would take 30 minutes.
My boss at my last job told me that he had observed that if he asked somebody “can you get this done by the end of they day”, he would get an accurate answer (either yes or no). Any further out, there was no correlation between what they said and what they actually delivered.
This is often overlooked and undervalued — upfront time spent on understanding the problem and designing before getting down to the actual work ends-up saving a lot of actual time. But most people don't have patience for that and think it is wasted time.
Yeah I've only been coding professionally for a year now and I do SO MUCH MORE reading/researching, planning, annotating, and pseudo coding than I ever did when I started.
The outcomes are so much more predictable / better quality.
It took 40 minutes to do that estimate.
But, TBF, several important decisions were made during the process of estimating, such as what should be excluded from the task, basic organization, and some research.
BTW the task being estimated was doing time estimates for a project (which came out to be 2-3 weeks).