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I struggle like crazy to estimate costs and time, in my mind everything works perfectly an hour or two in of coding I find problems that seem to be insurmountable which themselves blow apart the time allotted for the whole project. I hate staring at the code editor for days on end until it all works and I can move on, but it's a fact of life in our line of work it seems. These are the times when I wonder if I'm really good at being a dev. Still I don't give up, I keep at it until I get the right result and as such am one of the guys that locks themselves away until everything is done.
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A common manager "trait" is:
- Ask Dev to estimate time
- Dev isn't sure, overbudgets time as things always crop up, or guesses a figure
- Manager says it can't take that long, gives Dev half the amount of time to do it
- Dev kind of panics, agrees, then rushes into a few things
- Manager asks Dev for progress after half the time, then says we need it tomorrow
- Dev does some rushed work, manager has a go at Dev.
Variations on the above of course - but I suspect this accounts for a lot of the issues. Lesson to learn is take your time on estimates, stick by them, don't be pushed around, and create a paper trail if things start turning sour. -
@AlmondSauce In my first company, we had exactly that, a manager cutting estimates in half. Then the project was late in his view. The manager got angry. Engineering told him the project wasn't late, and if he ignored their estimates to make up his own ones, he had to blame himself.
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@Fast-Nop Yup, exactly. That's why it's so important to create a paper trail - otherwise said manager just denies that ever happening, and claims his estimate was the one you agreed.
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