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Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake (2020)

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• onion2k 5y ago
  The problem that the article doesn't address is that users don't actually seem to mind using terrible software so long as it solves the problem they face better than not using it. I could list literally hundreds of half-assed, broken, bloated applications that I've encountered in the past 25 years that have done very well simply because they kind of solve a problem a bit for the user. Pushing out something completely broken that doesn't do what it's supposed to is definitely not going to work (duh!). Pushing out an app that solves the problem of managing shopping lists that has a bug where it doesn't work given a particular set of circumstances will still lead to many people using it if the users don't have any alternatives and it's better than using a piece of paper. Software quality is important to companies because it means that they can spend more time building features instead of fighting fires, and because low quality represents a threat that a competitor could launch a better, less buggy app. Users mostly don't care so long as the app works well enough to do what they need it to do (but they're not dumb, they'll still pick the least buggy option if there are alternatives..). A high level of quality in software is not important unless you're entering an already well-served market. I wish it was.
  • cheschire 5y ago
    Just guessing, but I suspect this is because most software is designed to extract some minimum acceptable investment per person from maximum people, and simply focus on scaling. When software is designed to focus on extracting maximum investment per person, and focus on whaling vs scaling, then you get loot boxes. Suddenly overall software quality matters a whole lot to the user base.
    • pjc50 5y ago
      > whaling vs scaling This is a great phrase that I'll have to remember. Pretty much all enterprise sales is "whaling".
      • andruby 5y ago
        And yet, what I see is that enterprise software seems much less polished than consumer software. My assumption is also that enterprise software contains _more_ bugs than consumer software.
        • cheschire 5y ago
          That's probably why articles like this get written so often. The companies who create enterprise software seem to think they're still working on scale. And I don't intend my loot box reference to be taken too seriously. The gaming industry isn't any better. As an obvious example, Cyberpunk 2077 was delivered as a hot mess only to meet overhyped timelines. But look at games like Apex Legends, Fortnite, etc. They work very diligently to ensure the core gameplay is solid so streamers will provide eyeballs, driving lootbox sales. Whales provide the biggest investments there, with some individuals spending thousands of dollars for cosmetic lootboxes in what would otherwise be a free game. Then look at games like Quake Champions which should've been successful in the same way, and completely failed because they didn't focus on making the core game tech (net code specifically) rock solid before attempting to monetize. They immediately lost the pro crowd and failed to convert the people playing Quake Live (or even the die hard Q3A players). Enterprise software often doesn't spend enough time improving core process loops, or worse, provides too many core loops making the experience disjointed and unproductive.
        • pjc50 5y ago
          Yes, the "whale" is the single huge client who pays a lot of money for the enterprise software. The client is not the users. The sales pitch for enterprise software is where the polish goes.
          • 5y ago
  • rusk 5y ago
    Depends on where the “terrible” is. People are happy to work around UI/UX issues so long as they can get the job done (chronic ergonomic issues notwithstanding perhaps) but anything “back end” or “low level” can have catastrophic implications for mere usability. It’s funny because we often seem to ascribe higher priorities to the more visible stuff.
  • hipitihop 5y ago
    There is also a difference between buggy for the first time, which tends to cause a user to dismiss the app, versus sometimes buggy after the app is well established as useful for the user. At that point, there is a different dynamic at play for competitors, they need to be perceived a significant percentage better than the incumbent to overcome and justify the effort of the user changing. I have no sources to back that up sorry, just something observed.
  • knuthsat 5y ago
    I agree. I've been naive at the beginning of my career, thinking that a great product sells itself, but it's simply not true. There's so much trash everywhere that is earning millions (book reading apps, silly chart-db software, proprietary SQL databases etc.). I was quite shocked by the levels of disfunctionality in the software engineering sections of the company I worked at yet still, the company has huge success. We basically got requests from the product team to make something work in a day or two and even though it was completely horrible code that absolutely paralyzes us at some moment in the future, the company still reigns.
  • andruby 5y ago
    You are right. Solving the right problem the wrong way is more important than solving the wrong problem the right way. As an engineer, that has been one of the most important lessons for me in my career so far.
    • Lorkki 5y ago
      Or: Assuming a vacuum, solving the right problem is more important than solving it the right way. But also, solving it the wrong way may create an opportunity to do better.
  • amelius 5y ago
    > A high level of quality in software is not important unless you're entering an already well-served market. And don't get me started on security/privacy issues.
  • narag 5y ago
    The problem that the article doesn't address is that users don't actually seem to mind using terrible software so long as it solves the problem they face better than not using it. I've been saying that for a long time, but I don't see as a problem in itself, but as a fact of life. The problem comes because people get the wrong impression that "state of the art" is always a compliment and terrible usability is best of possible worlds. I'm reminded of this every time I try to teach my mother anything about Android or Windows. Or even when I must deal myself with a new app with its quirky "state of the art" GUI.
    • hobs 5y ago
      Android apps dont solve problems better than anything else, they are just more available so this doesn't gel for me. Windows and Android keep reinventing the same wheel even though (especially Windows) is basically still in "Windows 95" mode - getting fancy with a phone ui is just trash.
  • illuminati1911 5y ago
    ” A high level of quality in software is not important unless you're entering an already well-served market. I wish it was.” I’d say better way to say the same thing would be ”Unless you are building something truly innovative and unique that people must use anyway no matter how bad the experience is, software quality matters.”
    • namdnay 5y ago
      The thing is, 90% of software is “unique”, in the sense that it solves a specific business requirement
      • illuminati1911 5y ago
        I guess it depends how you look at it, but regarding my point it isn’t. For example most ecom apps/sites are surely ”unique” based on how you described it, but customers have nearly unlimited options/alternatives these days.
        • namdnay 5y ago
          I was referring to enterprise internal or b2b software
  • PaulKeeble 5y ago
    The first mover advantage is huge. Once users have already chosen to use your software it will take something substantially better over an extended period of time for most to move over to a competitor that has solved it better. The risk of that happening when you are already making money and solving the problem and have most of the market is small. If you keep irritating your customers and they have a better alternative then you will slowly loose share of the market. The cultures that tend to ship buggy software also tend to be the sort of cultures where the quality doesn't improve in response to a competitor however. But so far almost every software business has ultimately failed so being on top for a decade because you shipped some of the solution earlier works better. Customers are more than happy to buy exceptionally buggy software and games.
    • Retric 5y ago
      The first mover advantage is an illusion. Google didn’t invent search or online Email. Microsoft didn’t pioneer personal computing, spreadsheets, or word processing. Facebook wasn’t the first social network. Apple made most of it’s money from markets it entered late iPod, iPhone, and then iPad where the Newton failed. Intel wasn’t the first to build a microprocessor. IBM didn’t invent the computer.
      • dagw 5y ago
        The first mover advantage is an illusion. I wouldn't go that far. All the cases you cite are of products that definitely classify as substantially better than what they replaced. Before Gmail took over the market from Hotmail there had been several other companies that failed due to only being slightly better. Yes you can beat the "first mover", but doing so is hard and requires an almost revolutionizing better product.
        • Retric 5y ago
          I am not saying it’s easy to beat them, rather first movers also generally die or move on. Atari, Electronic Controls Company, Mosaic, etc simply aren’t around any more. Sure Yahoo isn’t dead, but it’s also moved on from it’s initial success.
  • indigochill 5y ago
    > A high level of quality in software is not important unless you're entering an already well-served market. Even then, it's not what's important. The core important thing in the product is that it does a job the customer needs done. If you write a program that provides complete feature parity with the incumbent with better engineering principles, you're going to lose because the engineering principles aren't the job the customer needs done. Where it will make the difference is that your company will be able to respond to changing requirements better than the incumbent. So solid software engineering is never the product for the customer. It might be the product for the company, depending if the company actually needs the improved developer efficiency and happiness it provides.
  • bishoprook2 5y ago
    >The problem that the article doesn't address Another. Industries that are oriented towards tradeshow or holiday launches. It ain't like they're going to move NAB or Christmas just for you. Inevitable feature pruning occurs. Having said that, I wonder how many of the great fortunes have been built on horrid, half-finished websites and associated software that were all about being first out of the gate and heavy marketing. An interesting subcase is software that is difficult or impossible to update vs. immovable deadlines. I guess in a world that consists entirely of one silly internet surveillance marketing company after another is doesn't really matter much anymore.
    • iso1631 5y ago
      October will be interesting, wonder how busy NAB will be. I know one supplier from the UK who's planning on quarantining in the carribean for 2 weeks ahead of NAB because the US still wont let people from Europe in (other than Nigel Farage)
      • bishoprook2 5y ago
        I think that eventually the vendors will decide that it's a waste of money.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Personally, I write software that I consider extremely high-quality. The folks that use it, seem to agree. It isn't eye-candy fancy, but it works very well, in a not-in-your-face manner. The idea is that it does what it says on the tin, without fanfare, robustly, usably, accessibly, localizably, and dependably; providing a user experience that gets out of the way of the user, in a manner that does not surprise the user (even "good" surprises can be an issue. Boring software can be just what the doctor ordered). In my book, that's the definition of "quality." I'm working on an application that has been over a year in the making. Its functionality is something that I could have popped out in a month, but making sure of the Quality of the app has necessitated that I spend a great deal more time, "polishing the fenders." If this were a commercial app (it isn't), then it would have been unbearably expensive for a startup. I tend to write test harnesses in a day or two, that have similar levels of functionality to this application. High Quality is significantly more expensive than even "decent, but lesser" quality.
    • onion2k 5y ago
      Professional developers should strive to write the highest quality code they can given the constraints of the project. That's pretty much a given. I'm only arguing that customers don't seem to care, not that we shouldn't care.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
        Exactly. I read a book, where one of the characters is a smith. It has this exchange, between him, and another character: "Always do the very best job you can," he said on another occasion as he put a last few finishing touches with a file on the metal parts of a wagon tongue he was repairing. "But that piece goes underneath," Garion said. "No one will ever see it." "But I know it's there," Durnik said, still smoothing the metal. "If it isn't done as well as I can do it, I'll be ashamed every time I see this wagon go by -and I'll see the wagon every day.”
        • moonchrome 5y ago
          One reason I like this kind of work is that it implies when someone spent that much effort on an irrelevant detail they probably paid attention to important parts as well. Not always the case but yeah.
  • Causality1 5y ago
    This is true, although there are other aspects. For example, if the best available solution to a problem is using software I hate then I'm going to develop a resentment towards its developers and consider them last when trying to solve future problems.
  • occz 5y ago
    I like what Peopleware says on the matter - the market has squarely selected low quality software over high quality, but if you try to drive your teams to build low quality software you will lose because you will be unable to retain good developers.
    • Joeri 5y ago
      Well, the market does not select for low quality, it just selects for an attribute that often coincides with low quality, like time to market or low cost.
  • taneq 5y ago
    > users don't actually seem to mind using terrible software so long as it solves the problem they face better than not using it This is true and, once you get over the myopic code focus that most of us shared in university, incredibly self-evident. "Users prefer to use the thing that solves their problem better than not using the thing." I mean... yes? The real takeaway is that "software quality" means something very different to users than it does to developers. Developers want efficient, ergonomic libraries, aesthetically pleasing logical structures, and elegant software designs. That's what we call "quality". Users just want their damn problem solved, and if they can GET software like that which solves that problem, then you bet they'll buy it, but if they can't then anything which actually solves their problem is far better than doing it by hand. This was the first big lesson I learned out of uni and it's stuck with me ever since. If you're interested in making commercial software, you're not there to solve the problems YOU think are important, you're there to solve the problems YOUR CUSTOMERS think are important.
  • kongolongo 5y ago
    I agree with that last sentence, but IMO even in a well-served market things like brand loyalty, familiarity, and social momentum can often be major deterrents to switching just for the sake of quality and often times unless the major players in a market are really messing up users will not see much of a reason to switch.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > Users mostly don't care so long as the app works well enough to do what they need it to do (but they're not dumb, they'll still pick the least buggy option if there are alternatives..). In other words: users do care. They just don't have a choice. That's not the same than users "not minding" bad software.
  • spottybanana 5y ago
    > A high level of quality in software is not important unless you're entering an already well-served market. I wish it was. Somewhat weird mindset. It is natural that when a new market gap is discovered, the first iteration of products are crappy and do the job just barely. Applies to software, cell phones, forestry machines, water toilets. Having a mindset where everything should be perfect from the start will get you nowhere.
  • avidiax 5y ago
    A classic screed on the same topic: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs240/old/sp2014/readings/worse-is-better.html https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs240/old/sp2014/readings/wor...
  • coffee 5y ago
    > The problem that the article doesn't address is that users don't actually seem to mind using terrible software so long as it solves the problem they face better than not using it. I could list literally hundreds of half-assed, broken, bloated applications that I've encountered in the past 25 years that have done very well simply because they kind of solve a problem a bit for the user. This is ZERO snark, but I'm genuinely curious for lots of examples. I ask because I'm confronted with this problem ALL THE TIME working at startups that obsessively focus on visual elements that won't move the needle, versus being obsessive about solving pain better than others. I need to start building a list that I can just pull out at a moments notice. Would love to hear more!
• webarchiver 5y ago
  Work expands to fill the time you have. If you don't set a goal, you'll never ship. Estimation is not an exact science, but, I rather set a goal post that I can move if I need to than not have one at all.
  • bcraven 5y ago
    "Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". It is sometimes applied to the growth of bureaucracy in an organization." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    The problem is that negotiations phase where the devs get screwed down on the “price”. This is of course a silly thing for management to do given they are paying by the hour anyway!
• RandomLensman 5y ago
  A better solution ten years later might not be a solution at all when running a business. So it cannot be just open ended. The point I take away from this more: poor planning and execution processes destroy value. It is not an "us" vs "them". Have clear responsibilities for removing internal/political blockages, for allowing testing, etc. How to manage new delays and unexpected issues? Who can decide on changes? Organizations can manage to hit target with a reasonable product/outcome.
• rusk 5y ago
  It’s like skeumorphism. It’s not ideal, but it’s a common or goal reference point that doesn’t need exhaustive explanation.
• Closi 5y ago
  Well the counter argument is that shipping later also destroys value (because value can only actually start to be accumulated once a product has shipped). But this article doesn't seem to address the obvious counter-point. For instance, take the below: > wouldn't you rather run a your customer's payments through code that is at least attempting to handle error conditions, rather than some happy path code that just assumes everything works? But this doesn't address the obvious issue which is, there is value destroyed (or not created) by not allowing customers to pay you earlier.
  • tuxie_ 5y ago
    "destroyed" and "not created" are not synonyms, they can't be used interchangeably as you do here. This invalidates the argument for me to be honest.
    • Closi 5y ago
      Well the article talks about examples of 'destroying value' being projects that failed to go live, which would be 'value not created' to your point (it's not my choice of language, I was just following the article!). If it invalidates my argument I assume it invalidates the article too.
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    I really don't like this conclusion. I guess this is why we need financial regulation, because rushing through a buggy payment system so you can make a buck quicker is how customers get their accounts hijacked and identities stolen. Maybe as an early-stage investor or company founder, it makes no difference to you because you'll exit before anything ever hits the fan and the law will never hold you accountable, but you might be ruining people's lives. Certain systems need to be robust even if it means businesses might have to earn revenue more slowly. You're not creating value in this case. You're stealing it from your customers.
    • Closi 5y ago
      The article is talking about integrating a payment gateway, so I don't think this specific risk is valid but the overall point is right - yes, there is a trade off between speed to market and how many workarounds will be required. The truth is that sometimes speed to market is more important than quality, and visa-versa. Handling sensitive credit card data? Sure quality and security are important of course. Implementing a payment gateway to bootstrap a company where that is 1 of 100 tasks before go-live? Hack away and go as fast as possible, and worry about improving it later!
• danparsonson 5y ago
  Alternate view point - driving projects to a specific deadline allows the other departments in the company to coordinate marketing, packaging, and selling the product. These people don't sit on their hands patiently waiting for engineers to finish building, their work can take many months just as the development does, and sometimes also involves making tradeoffs to deliver on time. No company wants to wait another year after development is finished before they start earning money for it.
  • pjc50 5y ago
    Yeah, this is an unfortunate truth that Agile has to confront; there may be hard coordination deadlines. Or, in startups, a financial "runway". On the other hand, setting a deadline can't force something to be possible, it can only force people to work harder and more painfully towards it. I'm sure the Amazon drone delivery failure had a date target, for example. And there have been plenty of failed "big bang" IT migrations delivered by similar immovable deadlines.
    • jnwatson 5y ago
      Agile is fine with fixed due dates. Fixed features on the other hand...
      • Jtsummers 5y ago
        Exactly this. You create a minimum set of features that must be shipped by the due date. You negotiate on this, adjusting the minimum set or the due date correspondingly. The desired features beyond the minimum set are accepted as being at risk of remaining unimplemented if the due date can't be shifted further to the right. They become stretch goals that may be achieved by the deadline, or will be worked into a second effort during the maintenance of the system. Agile (especially some of the stuff in the Lean Software world) is very well-suited to this kind of development. As are the classical evolutionary or iterative & incremental models.
    • madeofpalk 5y ago
      If anything this is the reality of shipping software that "agile" is designed to handle. It's so you can (hopefully) have an educated understanding of setting that deadline, and then how you're progressing towards it. It's so if you're not on track to deliver, you can make more educated decisions about cutting scope, or adding resources (yes yes yes, i know).
• senko 5y ago
  The article is full with interesting nuggets of wisdom, but I found it all over the place, as it mixes several issues (all of them important) into one. The article mentiones "high-value" projects (vs "low-value" projects), but the actual distinction made is between high-effort (new framework, new kind of product) and low-effort. Value and effort are not neccessarily correlated, indeed by the end of the article the team has had a high-effort project that resulted in a low-value product. It also conflates product discovery (what will actually have value to the users) and technical discovery (how do we build the damn thing). It starts with the technical challenges (and I totally subscribe to the notion that estimating anything that you're not doing routinely is Dangerous, see https://blog.senko.net/bridges-vs-apps https://blog.senko.net/bridges-vs-apps) but then veers off into describing mismatch between features built and value add (also a very important subject, but a different one). I would love to see author expand each of the sections into an own article and explore these things in more depth! The most underwhelming part for me are the recommendations at the conclusion. So (focusing here on tech aspects) if "Something by Date (tm)" methodology is bad (which I can agree with in principle), the solution to "let competent engineers prototype [the app] in 3 or 4 different frameworks", ie . "give your engineers unbounded time"? All developers (and I am one) wish they'd have more time to implement things properly, so that's not a new insight. But it's not actionable either - "give more time" then turns into "Something by Later Date (tm)", which is basically the same problem, just with more money (and thus stakes) involved. I hoped to see an exploration into how to creatively solve for "can we deliver value" + "we have this budget and time" constraints.
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  Given that people move jobs quickly anyway, it is not clear that value matters. Rather, I need the appearance of value by X and if that is done by mortgaging the future, well, that is the next guy's problem.
  • code_duck 5y ago
    That's a problem, not a solution.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      I agree that it is a problem. I just think the root cause here is driven heavily by how careers increasingly work.
• gregjor 5y ago
  Which is more likely: Businesses invent truly arbitrary deadlines for the hell of it, or the “engineers” don’t want to pay attention to business requirements and competitive pressures? When so-called engineers stop spending half the development schedule choosing a framework and the other half trying to make their dev setup work on everyone’s personalized laptop they will have some credibility complaining about “arbitrary” business goals and requirements.
  • kitsune_ 5y ago
    From anecdotal evidence, a) is more likely than b). The deadlines are arbitrary because most companies are slow bureaucratic oil tankers that are difficult to steer and will mow down everything in their path once a course is set. Management's job should to be to work on this, to improve the system as a whole and making it more nimble, not on myopic deadlines that fulfil some checkbox and are tied to your EOY bonus. This is outlined by people like Deming and others in the systems thinking space. From experience, in their career, engineers not only need to excel technically, but are also forced to pick up everything from UX, methodological BS (from Scrum to Itil) to domain specific know-how in multiple fields or areas. Since many managers do not know what they're doing, senior engineers often times end up being de facto management consultants as well. If you are working in a business environment (as opposed to writing low-level drivers or whatever) it's almost impossible to not pick up on what's going on around you. How many banking managers know how to code? How many engineers working in banking know at least something about the processes, compliance issues, how the org is structured, what the competitors are? The stereotype of the autistic programmer who is only interested in shiny gadgets and tech needs to die.
    • gregjor 5y ago
      I agree, except the programmer (autistic or not) who wants to be left alone to code and play with shiny things is not just a stereotype. Just read through HN any day to see posts about ignoring meetings, marketing, management, business priorities and focusing excessively on languages, tools, the “best” ways to do things, dismissing non-programmers as hopelessly useless (“many managers do not know what they’re doing.”) As a freelancer I have to get to know the business my customers are in, I can’t just focus on purely technical things most of the time. Many times I have described my work to other programmers and heard how they want to be left alone to code. I take over legacy software and failed projects for a living. The two main reasons in my experience for software dev project failure are (a) developers did not bother to gather and understand requirements but rushed to start coding, and (b) poor communication with the customer and stakeholders. Those faults may come from arrogance or inexperience, or both.
• stephc_int13 5y ago
  There is a counter intuitive thing about software project estimation that took a long time for me to discover. The more rigorously you try to analyse the problem, cutting it into smaller and smaller parts, the more error you introduce, reducing the value of the estimate at each step. Thus, the best practice is to give a very rough estimate based on the scale of the project and your past experiences. If you don't have previous experience with similar projects, then you should not even try to estimate.
  • rightbyte 5y ago
    Well it sounds like you are not doing Agile correctly. Jokes aside I think accumulation of errors together the fact that time estimations are hard and Parkinson's law is the fatal flaws with Agile. > Thus, the best practice is to give a very rough estimate based on the scale of the project and your past experiences. This is my experience too. It is somehow easier to estimate big scopes then many small that sums up to the same scope. Also you get a better feeling of how far you have come when looking at the big scope then when digging down to the details.
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    Theoretically, this should be the exact opposite of the truth. Breaking a big prediction into a whole lot of smaller predictions is the basic intuition behind Fermi estimation and wisdom of crowds. As long as errors are symmetrically distributed and independent of each error, they'll cancel each other in aggregate. The problem is estimation errors are not symmetrically distributed because engineers chronically underestimate how long something will take, and the problem is exacerbated by management pressure giving them an incentive to estimate even lower.
    • stephc_int13 5y ago
      This is why this is counter intuitive. We're trained to cut big problems in small parts to solve them. This is more closely related to human psychology than pure logic.
    • jerf 5y ago
• nabla9 5y ago
  Chapter 11. Plan to Throw One Away Chemical engineers learned long ago that a process that works in the laboratory cannot be implemented in a factory in only one step. An intermediate step called the pilot plant is necessary to give experience in scaling quantities up and in operating in nonprotective environments. For example, a laboratory process for desalting water will be tested in a pilot plant of 10,000 gallon/day capacity before being used for a 2,000,000 gallon/day community water system. Programming system builders have also been exposed to this lesson, but it seems to have not yet been learned. Project after project designs a set of algorithms and then plunges into construction of customer-deliverable software on a schedule that demands delivery of the first thing built. In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three. There is no alternative but to start again, smarting but smarter, and build a redesigned version in which these problems are solved. The discard and redesign may be done in one lump, or it may be done piece-by-piece. But all large-system experience shows that it will be done.[2] Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time. The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers. Seen this way, the answer is much clearer. Delivering that throwaway to customers buys time, but it does so only at the cost of agony for the user, distraction for the builders while they do the redesign, and a bad reputation for the product that the best redesign will find hard to live down. Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow. -- Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
  • andrekandre 5y ago
    this is great comment! i must say, the mythical man-month should be a must-read* for any technical managers or execs in a tech org (hmmm throw devs in that list too) *and maybe re-read every year to keep it fresh in mind
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  this seems to mainly be relating to pushing to an arbitrary date for creating something new but still sometimes dates are given to us because of some sort of regulatory reason or a company contract meaning that something needs to be done by a certain time - before anyone says don't make contracts like that: The Danish and Swedish parts of Thomson Reuters WestLaw were sold off to an English holding company, as part of the sale the sold off parts were allowed to remain on WestLaw for one year after which they would have had to pay approx. $165,000 dollars a month. Obviously we got off of by that arbitrary date, and if we hadn't that would have been a value destroying mistake. on edit: the weird monetary amount is my attempt to turn to U.S.D the DKK amount at the time which was 1 million dkk - iirc the dollar was at a low but it was between 161 - 165.
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    Also government contracts, at least in the US, have to be authorized by an appropriations bill from Congress. A federal agency can't just go to Congress and ask for an unknown amount of money to deliver a capability at an unknown date. Whether it ends up being right or not, and probably it usually isn't, appropriations bills have to be time-bounded and include a maximum dollar amount, and the awarded contract can't go longer or higher no matter what the engineers think it will actually take.
    • jdbernard 5y ago
      In which case it would be wise to be extremely conservative in your estimation, taking initial engineering estimates and padding them further, not whittling them down. Because a baby takes nine months and can't be safely rushed out in six no matter the acts of congress, presidential edicts, and demands from the grand poobah. If you fix the dates, something else has to give. If time, cost, and scope are all fixed you're going to fail, almost guaranteed. There are always unknowns and in this scenario the only thing you've allowed to flex is quality. I'm not saying you can't come in on time and under budget. This article spells out the dysfunctional dynamic of date pressure. By creating this much pressure from the beginning, you create an environment when corners are cut from the beginning and the problem compounds over time. The pressure-cooker mindset of management kills the quality of the project, even if the estimates did turn out to be reasonable.
• darkerside 5y ago
  I'm not convinced an arbitrary date is a bad idea, and in fact, I continue to think it's a good one. If you don't have a point in time you are optimizing for as a developer, then why wouldn't you continue to gold plate and improve your code? Once you have a ship date, you know when it is time to knock it off and start heading downhill. The real problem here is the leadership deficit. The manager got pushback on the estimates, and instead of explaining the reasoning and bargaining on scope, he caved and kicked the can down the road by letting the estimates crumble. Yes, estimating is hard, and you are probably going to be wrong, but once you have your finger on the scale to get a desired result, you can't blame that on the difficulty of estimating. Just deplorable leadership.
  • papito 5y ago
    Right, but these dates should be intrinsically motivational, and not induce negative stress.
  • FinanceAnon 5y ago
    >If you don't have a point in time you are optimizing for as a developer, then why wouldn't you continue to gold plate and improve your code? Because it feels good to complete work and I would like to move on to other features. How long can you work on improving a single piece of code before getting bored?
    • darkerside 5y ago
      So developers should work on features until they get bored of making them better?
      • FinanceAnon 5y ago
        That's not what I am saying. The parent post makes it sound like, if a developer doesn't have a deadline he will just work on a single feature forever. I am saying that most developers intrinsically want to complete features to move on to new stuff. If they are in a good environment, arbitary deadlines are not required. When I pick up a feature, I know roughly how long it will take and I will try to finish it within that time. I don't need an arbitary deadline from management.
• bjarneh 5y ago
  The whole point of organizing things in the first place, is to reduce or remove uncertainty and risk, which cannot be done with software projects. Software engineering is similar to writing a book, or a movie script; but it is mistaken for some advanced reorganization of numbers in an Excel sheet. Normal leadership training relies heavily on deadlines to "move things forward", or force us to "see where we are" etc. This only creates stress on the creators themselves, making them far worse at actually creating something. This is something all developers know, and this is why companies started by developers often have a very relaxed attitude towards work. I.e. the dart board, pool table, or beer taps are not there to make the office "look cool", it's there to make a relaxed atmosphere, where you work when you are "in the zone", and relax when you are not. Everyone who writes movie scripts, books or software knows that you can do more in 4 hours of when you are in "the zone", than in 80 hours in an open landscape, where days are split into short work hours, disturbed by status meetings about progress etc.
• stupidcar 5y ago
  It seems strange to me that software engineers are so frequently singled out for schedule slippage, when the impression I get is that every novel engineering project suffers from the exact same problem. Projects to design and build new military and civilian hardware and infrastructure always involve budget and schedule overruns of months or years. Can anyone provide convincing empirical evidence that software projects are delayed more than hardware projects of equivalent budget and distinctiveness from previous solutions? A negative comparison often seems to be made between software engineering and construction, but it seems to me that the latter is a unique subfield of engineering, where you have an unusually large number of projects with a roughly homogenous set of constraints and variables. This has allowed those constraints and variables to be studied, understood and mastered to produce a discipline that more closely resembles mass-production. And in those subfields of software that also involve more homogenous constraints, such as the production of standard commercial websites, you do see a more controlled and templated approach, using tools like Wordpress.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    To list just a few such slipping projects outside the software realm: * Space Launch System * Boston's Big Dig * New Berlin-Brandenburg Airport
    • pavlov 5y ago
      The Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland. It’s a new type of reactor and one of the only nuclear projects in the West. Construction started in 2005 and the plant was supposed to be online in 2010. Eleven years later it’s still not operational. Original budget was 3 billion euros. Current estimate is over 11 billion.
      • liketochill 5y ago
        Wise moves on the part of the project proponent, had they presented their project with a 17 year construction and 11 billion euro budget it never would have been started. Humans are optimistic. If we knew in the beginning how long something will actually take we never would start many things.
• 23B1 5y ago
  Can someone tell the engineers I'll be happy to give them unlimited time if they will give me unlimited value?
  • catmanjan 5y ago
    Given unlimited time you can have unlimited anything, no?
• altitudinous 5y ago
  Once you've been around in this software business for long enough you see the same articles written over and over again... there will always be articles about estimating software, yet there is no solution to this problem. Anyhow, it doesn't matter. Software devs are the lowest cog, they don't get to extend the delivery date. All the layers above - management, marketing, sales etc need a date to work to to deliver their work, and they generate the $$$. No-one cares if the software is low quality, as long as it is delivered. Dev team can do further updates to bug fix after delivery. The end.
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    No one gets to choose the delivery date, other than actual reality. Anything before that is a prediction. The question is how good is your predictive model and do people understand the error margins. In my experience high ups like to promise dates (in general). But it’s a dance: everyone knows it’ll be later because “IT project” It takes a lot of trust and maturity and skill (from both technical and business side) to have continual value delivery instead of estimates. This is possible but not the common case.
  • sumtechguy 5y ago
    It is what we seem to call the 'unknown unknown'. Basically something popped up that was not planned for and now you need to research/fix/qa and shove that in. Even our 'known' bits are always underestimated. Because many people are hopeful and willing to 'try harder'. Heck I personally just did this. I scoped out a story. Then realized I had underestimated it because there was at least 2 tech stacks in the thing I had not used much. So I had to basically drop what I was going to do and figure out some PoC on that. THEN I could write my code.
  • zug_zug 5y ago
    Yeah, if I could go back in time I'd tell myself "Software has always been late, it's always going to be late, you can work yourself extra-hard to make it less late, but it's not YOUR PROBLEM. You can compensate for the malfunction of the organization but you won't be thanked, you won't learn as much by hacking, and it almost never matters anyways because the startup either will get traction or it won't, it never fails by a margin of 5%"
• yeneek 5y ago
  Author is wrong about the underlying cause of that disaster. From my point of view, the cause is different: 1. Lack of design a.k.a. designed by coders > At 5 months the team has happy path coded the entire feature list, the screens are ugly and non-intuitive, ... It's obvious, that the product wasn't designed. Feature list isn't design. Competitors app isn't design. When you have UX/UI/API designed, it doesn't happen that the result product is ugly because of the lack of time. Lack of time may cause, that there will be nicely looking, but slow/incomplete/unreliable product. You need blueprints before building. It can be designed upfront by one designer who is in contact with user and stakeholders. When not, it has to be designed during coding by software engineers which are drowning in technical details and cut off from users. So just having some more time wouldn't make it a good product. Also with some plan, they could have created estimation based on something. That would help them to get a realistic timeline. In the end, the boss and PM should have known better.
• papito 5y ago
  This is a combination of management not asking for input, pulling a deadline out of their asses, and engineers chronically low-balling their own estimates (while the managers think it's the opposite). My pet peeve is when a deadline is a "round" date. 1st of the month, 1st of the year. WHY? Your users don't give a shit. If you are not publicly committed to a launch date, which you should never be, until your product is ready. That said, internal deadlines are a moronic thing to have. These should be goals.
• bykhun 5y ago
  Love the format of the talk converted to the text
• wilde 5y ago
  I’ve lived through a project managed like this. The problem isn’t the date. It’s the unwillingness to prioritize and cut scope when the bottoms up estimates show your first version is too big.
• mprovost 5y ago
  When I was in the VFX world we had fixed, hard deadlines. Once the release date is printed on a movie poster it's not changing. Some parts of the process were easy to estimate since they'd been done many times before, but on every film there were some experimental new things. Often they would just end up with 2 or 3 different teams working on the same problem. One with a known technique, and one or two trying something new. Then if the new stuff didn't work or was taking too long, you could always fall back to the old way. Which wouldn't look as good or achieve the effect you wanted, but :shrug:. There was always the chance that you'd work sometimes for years though and your work would get dropped which was never that fun for the artists involved. Most development teams don't have the resources to have an A and B team working on the same problem but it's a way to contain risk. The studios use release dates as deadlines basically to contain costs. Otherwise some directors will just keep working on a movie forever (or keep going back to it like George Lucas). Some movies, especially with VFX, are never really done, they just get to the deadline and finish with what they have at that point.
  • wmeredith 5y ago
    "In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned; and this abandonment, of the book to the fire or to the public, whether due to weariness or to a need to deliver it for publication, is a sort of accident, comparable to the letting-go of an idea that has become so tiring or annoying that one has lost all interest in it." –Rosalie Maggio Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/03/01/abandon/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/03/01/abandon/
    • quickthrower2 5y ago
      Is this why people have trouble with the last 5% of finishing their personal projects?
• JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Just-in-time software has been a thing for a long time. It's not a mistake.
• indymike 5y ago
  There are three kinds of deadlines: fake deadlines, contract/revenue driven deadlines and reality driven deadlines. Most problems with deadlines I've seen come from chronically mislabeling the deadline (e.g. sales don't close, so engineers start ignoring revenue driven deadlines). Fake deadlines sometimes are necessary to get things to some finished state, but they should be used very sparingly. Deadlines should be honest, and when something changes (e.g. some other team is going to be 3 weeks late on their part of the product so being on time doesn't matter) the deadlines should be quickly adjusted. Deadlines are a work-planning and asset allocation constraint, and will cause very bad decisions if they are not understood and managed well.
• dangerface 5y ago
  There is nothing wrong with working to dead lines estimating and planing development and releasing software thats good enough not perfect. The problem is when people start trying to change the plan half way through execution, non tech people will constantly try to do this because they are clueless its the project leads job to tell them no. When your manager asks you "if anything can be done to pull those dates in." you say "no" problem solved, until your line manager goes to the big boss who asks the same thing and do you know what your answer is? Thats right its "no". When the big boss says you have to do something then tell him "I cant magic more time you need to cut features", big boss and manager will argue their point but unless you can do magic your point remains the same. I know its scary being blunt with your big boss but as a senior developer thats your job.
  • Sparkyte 5y ago
    The magical scope creep fairy wants to talk to you. :)
  • hobs 5y ago
    Ah, you are one of those "difficult developers" :) Be blunt with your boss but also dont forget to quit if they dont change their behaviors. Just "finishing up" a project of "6 months" where we went from reasonable to unreasonable scope, and I was the only one that said it was unlikely we were going to finish on time, weird that I was the only non-contractor.... Almost a year a shoddy version that's just copying data from their existing product is only mostly a buggy mess!
  • taneq 5y ago
    > I know its scary being blunt with your big boss but as a senior developer thats your job. This. They could hire any random chump to say they're right. If you're the expert, they hired you to tell them whether they're right. Of course, not all managers understand this but the sooner you realise you're working for one who doesn't, the better.
  • danmaz74 5y ago
    Well, sometimes you can reduce scope to meet a deadline. It's often not advisable, but it's also sometimes necessary.
• vagrantJin 5y ago
  To be fair, Engineers engineer and wouldn't mind spending twenty years engineering and discovering new paradigms and interesting things to get 1.2% gains. Deadlines force the issue to put the wandering mind of the engineer in a straight-ish path. Not perfect, but the alternative would take a lifetime.
• timmg 5y ago
  I always tell my PM: You can pick a feature set or a launch date. You can't pick both.
  • ornornor 5y ago
    My team tried that too. We were laughed out of the room. The project failed. We’re starting a new project with exactly the same mindset. But this time it’s different, I’m sure.
• mwcampbell 5y ago
  > The Big Boss is a pressure kind of guy, he believes that people work best when they are under pressure and if pressure isn't applied, they waste a lot of time on unnecessary things. [...] he goes away thinking what he already knew, that engineering is just screwing around instead of getting the project done. Sadly, he's often not wrong. My own work ethic isn't exemplary, and sometimes in the absence of pressure I slack off. I'm surely not the only one. I don't know what to do about it though.
  • 52-6F-62 5y ago
    Reframe the question: is it slacking off or is it restorative mental break? Just speaking for myself, but I think better when I'm not pinched between two projects both demanding preference and priority over the other. I can maintain a clearer mind when I don't have people breathing down my neck about deadlines they set and then broke. Sure, one learns to navigate those situations and maintain an even keel, but still one is obligated to respond in a professional manner to those inquiries and meetings and other emotionally manipulative games people play to get their way when in a crunch. Working through those things still requires time out of day and energy out of mind. Both of those latter resources are limited.
• jackryan946 5y ago
  I caught my cheating partner thanks to this hacker that helped me track and hacked all social media accounts of my partner, without my partner knowing. You can contact him at: alvaroperea946@gmail.com He did excellent job for me.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• BLanen 5y ago
  The diagrams in this article are a value destroying mistake
• toolslive 5y ago
  time, scope, quality, cost. pick 3, the 4th will be a function of the 3 parameters you picked. So you need to understand what's important. If you're building a Mars lander, time is everything because if you miss your launch window, you need to wait 18 months for the next one. Most of us are doing something else.
• jdauriemma 5y ago
  The most effective manager-engineer relationships I've seen are built upon a problem-solving culture, rather than feature-shipping. If your goal is to solve problem X in Q3, your managers and engineers have far more flexibility to collaborate and compromise. If your goal is to ship X features in Q3, your managers have less flexibility and your engineers have an incentive to cut corners.
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  "Our boss can't judge the quality of our work, but he knows when it's late" -- Dilbert
  • ishjoh 5y ago
    I don't think even the great Yogi Berra could have said it better.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bob1029 5y ago
  There is never going to be one clear way to deal with scheduling around software projects. The number of variables involved is vast. I view schedules around software projects as a few different things: - Public expectations for specific deliverables that your customers can align to, many times with a calendar unique to each customer. - Internal carrot/stick for managing constraints around active feature development. If you have an infinity budget (film/AAA gaming), you might be able to run less-bounded parallel efforts as noted elsewhere in this thread. - Orthogonal operational concerns (planned outages, et. al.) - Roadmap for strategic product development that the investors can think about So, when someone says something to me like "are we still on track for end of the week?", I have to provide an extremely qualified series of responses and ask more questions.
• fnord77 5y ago
  I know it's just an illustration, but that "Code done with care" section is making me twitch. No transaction context to rollback if one of the steps fails.
• brightball 5y ago
  Yep. I’ve preached this whenever I talk about dev process. The best way I’ve heard it framed was using two different terms: deadline and target date. Target dates are internal goals, not tied to anything other than a rough estimate or a day somebody made up. Deadlines are tied to contractual obligations, events, etc. If it’s not a real deadline it’s a target and targets can move. Real deadlines mean you start talking about how to trim your requirements to have a shot at hitting it.
  • Trasmatta 5y ago
    In my experience "target dates" have a funny way of transforming themselves into deadlines over time.
    • Jtsummers 5y ago
      It's the confusion of estimates and plans with commitments. "How long will this take?" "About a week" "Great, ship it Monday morning" "Wait, if it has to be Monday then let's spend 30 minutes figuring out what needs to be shipped and what can slip until a later update release" "No, you said a week".
    • brightball 5y ago
      Like most things, it depends on leadership beating the dead horse to constantly remind people of the difference.
• bitwize 5y ago
  Deadlines are a fact of life. Without them, nothing would get done in a timely fashion. If you do not know how to work to a deadline, you are not a professional.