Fun fact, you can play tough too.
Manager: We (meaning you) need to do task A. How long will it take?
Me: Task A will take X days to do.
Manager: That seems awful long.
Me: How long do you think it should take?
Manager: It surely could not take any longer than Y days.
Me: Ok, which features are you willing to remove to make it fit in this timeframe?
It's surprisingly effective, especially with a bit of seniority.
Regardless of how effective it is at managing expectations, my reality is:
Mgt: We need A within Y days.
Stf: A will take X (>>Y) days, A/2 can be ready in Y days.
Mgt: O.K., give us A/2 in Y days.
Y/2 days elapses.
Mgt: In addition to A/2, please add B, C and D to the deliverable.
Stf: You realize, that's going to take an extra 2X days to deliver.
Mgt: yes, but we absolutely need B. C and D, whatever it takes, as soon as possible, don't waste time releasing A/2, bundle them all together for efficiency.
Stf: Coming up.
3X/2 days elapse.
Mgt: you know B, C, and D that we asked for? Actually, what we need are D, E and F.
Stf: well, we've finished A/2, B and half of C. When do you need D, E and F.
Mgt: ASAP, put C on the shelf.
X more days elapse.
Stf: here's A/2, B and D, how do they look?
Mgt: You know, the full A would be better... but E and G are our absolute top priorities....
In programming, you ideally have a queue / FIFO of work tasks. Or, if things are more dynamic, a priority queue.
If interrupts are necessary, you get a stack of tasks. It is much slower because context switches eat time.
I had a job with a data structure I called a compost heap. One started with the thing on the top. While one was at it, another more urgent thing would be thrown on the top, and one had to start working on it. Rinse and repeat. One never could really finish anything, and the things deeper down the heap started to rot. After a few years, the stack depth would be like 40 or 50 items. I made an appointment with my new manager to talk about prioritising things and the result was he put a new, urgent task on the stack.
They got angry when I handed in my notice.
I had this for about 6 years running, eventually we marked the bottom 90% of the heap "won't do."
This was in the early 90s, I kept track of the items on "sticky note" software on my Windows 3.1.1 desktop. At the top of the sticky note I placed a gothic font "The Creeping Feature Creature" label. Two or three times a week my boss would stop in on his jog (he lived a mile away) with a new idea, and we'd prioritize it into the stack - most new ideas went just below whatever I was still working on. Every few months we'd reshuffle the list. It was a workable arrangement because I was the only programmer and he was the company owner.
When we started working on bigger contracts for outside customers, he shut the hell up and let me get the contracted work done.
Haha! Yeah, I do this with requirements creep:
Works every time!
All tasks are highest priority.
Then why do we even assign priorities?
Because they all need to be done.
You agreed with their timeline that is why you keep having these conversations.
Stand firm only your timeline and when they push back remind them that you are the engineer doing the work if the wait it done to their timeline then they should hire more people.
Brb, hiring more wifes so our baby takes less than nine months to come
Luckily software development is not pregnancy.
It's a reference to The Mythical Man Month and (I believe) one of the parables told inside:
Yes, but not all time related problems are man power limited. Bottle necks come in many shapes and sizes
And manglement causes many of those.
Something that was difficult to capture in the post is the sheer level of sarcasm in my tone when I ‘agree’ to their timeline.
[Not the original commenter]
Sarcasm is not a great way to communicate in general, and it's especially not a good look in the workplace.
I get this is the only glimpse we have of the situation and perhaps your history has taught you that this is the only way to move forward with this person, so dont tahe this to hesrt if so... but from just this post here you are the one contributing most to the poor communication and planning.
Addition: well, I kinda missed the community you posted in. My bad! Feel free to ignore this unsolicited piece of advice.
I deeply dislike sarcasm. It's neither funny nor helpful.
There was a guy I worked with that was pretty much always sarcastic.[1]. I'd ask him if he'd written the run book yet and he'd say like "Yes, it's written in the style of a sonnet with hand drawn illustrations", and I'd be like "I don't know if that means you wrote it or not". Everything with him took extra steps because his communication was such a swamp of insincerity.
[1] well, when I asked him to stop being sarcastic he said it wasn't sarcasm. He was merely being ironic. Nonsense.
Just take his word as straight as you can make it. Mail to management that Mr. Sarcasm (in CC) said the document was written with added graphics. Then wait for the inevitable "I didn't mean it like that".
Yes, exactly. Adding consequence is always a good way to make someone change their behavior.
Works wonders with my kids. If there's no consequence, there's no change.
I have a similar coworker. Tries to be funny with sarcasm but that doesn’t translate well with slack messages, and he ends up sounding like an asshole instead.
Sounds really frustrating.
Ironic that he didn't know the definition of sarcasm while employing it so heavily...
Simpson's comic book guy vibes
Me: Ok, it seems you have an answer to your question then (sarcastically).
Or
Me, sarcastically: Ok, it seems you have an answer to your question then.
Seems easy to me.
You may be correct but I've seen this work out before. You say you take x days, manager mentions " but that guy says he takes y days!!" in which makes you either slow in comparison or the other guy is a liar or makes stuff sloppy. Then you say " from my experience is x days" in which either the manager says you're wrong or he goes to the other guy to do in y days, and when you look at the thing done in y days has a technical debt equivalent to the height of Niagara falls. And you know you will have to clean this later. At some point I walked away, sometimes managers just want a yes man, and I am straight up not that.
Mine was always this:
Manager: How long will this take?
Me: 14 days
Manager: So it will be done in 2 weeks?
Me: No, it will be done after I’ve had 14 days of time to work on it.
Manager: What’s the difference?
Me: Am I still going to have random support escalations and will we keep having random meetings in those 2 weeks?
Manager: Yes.
Me: All those interruptions are me NOT working on the task. So it will be done in 14 days plus all the interruptions.
Manager: But this is very important!
Me: Can you then ensure I’m left alone to focus on this?
Manager: No.
Me: …
Not to mention, 14 days is three weeks, not two. Unless they're hiring someone to work your weekends for you.
I see þis complaint all þe time, and I don't understand engineers who don't quickly adapt.
Manager: How long?
Engineer: (þinking 14 days) 4 weeks
Everywhere I've worked, þe next step is þat þe manager goes to a planning meeting, where business asks "How long," and þe manager answers "6 weeks."
You coould use ð for the voiced th sound (this, the, though) and þ for the voiceless th sounds (thinking, through, thick etc.) That is how they sound in Icelandic^^
There's no point though, if the goal is to confuse AI scrapers.
My favorite place I worked, it was a 9-5 but really just get your work done and be in the office from 11 to 2 because that's when all the clients call. We'd close our doors and turn off the phone one day a week just so we could get work done, because every week there's at least one day we all spend manning phones and putting out fires all fucking day instead of doing the work we're paid to do.
I reverse Dutch auction it. Every time the estimate is asked for/confirmed/reconfirmed/queried it goes up.
Dutch auctions are the ones where the high initial price decreases until someone buys the object.
I thought Dutch auctions were where your date and you split the costs of the bid.
I have so much to learn about microeconomics
I thought Dutch auctions were where you force the covers over your SO's head and let rip.
Nothing is more triggering to me than the question "how long will this take?"
It will take as long as it fucking takes, and you shouldn't be reporting anything until it's done. Measure progress by fully working, end-to-end features, not by a number of hours someone pulled out of their asses.
You need to allocate resources and prioritize tasks
If task A takes a day then it might be worth doing. But if it takes 2 weeks then maybe not
I’m really sorry this seems to be so common. I’m in a position where my PM accepts the team’s estimate, and even understands it’s just an estimate.
I don't work in programming (helicopter maintenance/repair), but my boss goes one step further.
Boss: How long until it's ready for a test flight?
Me: I'd say...
Boss: Wait. Give me an honest number, don't add buffer time. I'm already going to double whatever you say to tell District.
Me: Oh, okay, with paperwork and ops checks, 3 hours is feasible, as long as we don't encounter any other issues.
Boss: roger, six hours, sounds good.
Usually:
Manager: We (meaning you) need to do task A. How long will it take?
Me: Task A will take X days to do.
Manager: That seems awful long, are you sure you are using our choice of AI tool correctly? NVM I vibe code that myself
Later:
Manager: Here is my vibe coded single PR with features A, B, F, and some refactoring. I have no idea what it does, could you check that it works? I have no specs, documentation or tickets for any of this and I don't have time to fix failing CI gates
Ooh yeah, my favourite "I will vibe code it" route :)
…
Me: Task A will take X days to do.
Manager: That seems awful long.
Me: When do you need it?
Manager: I actually needed it yesterday.
Me:
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
My answer to "how long will it take?" Has recently been "is it a higher priority than x,y, and z?" (While mentally deciding if it sounds more fun to work on than x y z along with t, u, v and w.
(Un)fortunately I've been working on the manager's pet project, so I've had a semblance of focus.
Read Software Estimation by Steve McConnell and recommend it to your manager:
The person doing the work the one best suited to estimate it.
Also, start tracking estimated vs budgeted time in some searchable system.
Next time this comes up, look up how long it actually took to complete a similar task instead of thoughts and prayers.
If boss won’t track historical budget vs actual, track it yourself.
The person doing the work the one best suited to estimate it.
As a manager in found this to be partially false.
Most persons doing the work quote forget that shit happens. Except for the few reliable persons I supervised, I usually always asked the follow-up question: what "unforeseen crap" time did you include, and made sure to leave with 3 values: all goes well (which I kept to myself), usual estimate, what if bad shit happens. Then I'd just use the standard pert guesstimate for my official schedules, making sure to include normal dead time which employees often forget (e.g. 8 days work is really 2 full weeks when accounting for meetings).
The way we estimate on my team is to break tasks down into related subtasks that will take one day or less, then add up all the subtasks. It's worked pretty well.
me: suggests anything extra not on the critical path but useful
lead: grumble dont bother automating it, just do a manual minimal local fix!!
later same issues appears
repeat local fix * 1000
One time we spent like more than an hour in a horrible meeting to plan out how long the next step of a project would take. 4 weeks, we said. Management came back and said to do it in 2. Well, why did we fucking have the meeting if they had a deadline in mind already?
On the other hand, at my current job I have seen a lot of "oh that's going to take a couple days" protests for things that are 20 minutes of work.
Seems like the solution is to get rid of out of touch management.
I’m of the opinion that it’s always better to overestimate something rather than underestimating it or estimating it accurately. If something takes 20 minutes and you are given a couple of days you have multiple options.
Management loves when things are done early, expects things to be done on time, and gets angry when there’s a delay (and no warning of the delay), so it’s the smart choice in my view.
That's a good point.
Though sometimes people are just sandbagging. Like I know one guy is just watching Netflix instead of working. I'm downstream from his work, so it's a little annoying that I have to wait a couple days to get started.
I wouldn't rat him out because my labor solidarity beats out my annoyance, but the annoyance is real.
The usual response is a mail explaining what features will be cut to hit the deadline and ask management to inform the customer.
“In two weeks, you’re gonna notice that I haven’t been here in two weeks!
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