Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

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>There is back-and-forth as the estimates are questioned for being too high, almost never for being too low.

I believe this has only happened to me once in my career. My employer had recently switched from flat rate project bids to time and materials. A data transformation project that looked like it would take five or six weeks turned out to have repetitive tasks that could be automated easily. My estimate of three days, which was already padded, wasn't appreciated by the PM what wanted a month of revenue. After being told several times to account for contingencies and not budging much on my estimate, the project was taken from me and given to another engineer who gave the PM the estimate she wanted. While this was going on, I had already written the necessary code. My coworker had a month of mostly relaxed days as I turned the code over to him and he got busy finding ways to look like he was doing work for a month. Maybe I should have done that instead.

To be clear, if I was your PM I wouldn't have done it, but... You should've done that instead because likely not even your customer cared. They okayed a month and would've been unhappy if it was late, but otherwise they usually don't care. Being predictable is more important than being cheap.

This is important to understand. When you agree for a contract, do not renegonatiate the offer by lowballing yourself because you found a way to do it faster. This is unlikely something that will be appreciated by management.

I can see how this makes people cynical, it does to me to some extent.

But now I view it as: your goal isn't to perform the best on your term. It's to perform the best on terms of whatever your management says you should do. Hopefully, that's in alignment. If it isn't, then keep on searching for a job while working there, or simply have peace with it.

Personally I view it as a successful project for the client.

The client wanted something done but they only had some time/budget to work on it. The developer looked into it and was able to get the project done. It's great.

Let's not forget that the job done is not done for myself, but for the company which employed me to do the job. So if it takes less time, I'd report it and if the others refuse to budge, I will use that extra time to do some courses or such - also very useful to myself AND the employer. Win win and no need to get cynical.

That’s one way of looking at it.

The other way is: imagine how much your client is going to trust you forevermore if you tell them you did it in half the original estimate. The next time you slip they will happily pay you because they know you are honest. They might like you so much that they will do referral calls for other clients. Etc.

Reputation matters.

Yeah, let your competitor do it for you and drive you out of business.

You did the right thing. If it were a client, I would have said hey, I wrote this amazing way to automate your job and I'm going to save you half the time I estimated.

Half being contingent on how much originality went into the automation process. If you just did away with 300 hours of work for yourself in one hour, charge 150 hours.

[edit] How many hours they were expecting is also key here.

[edit2] but you morally did the right thing, and your colleague who took the summer off is a jerk. Hopefully you spent the time doing something more useful than repetitive work, and that is a reward in itself.

Looking at it from the PM's perspective they may well have been burnt in the past by developers giving optimistic estimates. I've done a few data transformation projects and they rarely go as planned.

Morally certainly the right thing, unfortunately morality isn't what keeps business and career afloat.

I ended up quitting that job over a dispute on double billing clients. If they had changed my timesheet entries after I made them, I would never have known but they insisted that I enter incorrect inflated hours. They justified it as recovering PM time the client wasn't willing to pay for which only made me less willing to falsify my time. Scummy company but this was during the dot com bust and they did survive when many of our competitor's died.

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