I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”
  • kambushaEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    Perhaps an interesting analogy, but offers nothing in terms of how to improve estimation. The only thing I can take away from this is to always add contingency to an estimate.

    • prettybunnysEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      I’ll be sending this to my team this morning because I’m always the one yelling “no it’s gonna take 3x as long as that” while everyone says nooo it’s easy.

      Then <shocked pikachu> as the work takes 4x as long

  • NobodyElseEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    Instead of four hours, this could have taken half an hour by properly exploring the problem and mapping out a solution first. Everyone seems to shit on drawing up an architecture first and wants to immediately start coding, but taking a little time up front to think through the problem pays huge dividends in the long run.

    • iopq@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      3 days ago

      You can just throw away your code and you don’t need to go back to the store to continue. Starting to code right away would work just fine if you’re not doing real world tasks