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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

You are flying a plane over the Atlantic and you realize that you may not have enough fuel to make it to shore. Your options are:

1. Focus on flying the plane in a manner that uses as little fuel as possible not bothering to even glace at the fuel gauge, watching the air currents and gliding where possible.

2. Turn on autopilot and spend time and effort trying to calculate the fuel you have to see if you make it to shore before going back to flying as conservatively as possible.

Number 2 feels better. Number 1 is more likely to end with a safe landing.

If you have a deadline and won't be getting new resources any time soon, and what purpose does a estimate serve if you are already committed?

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> If you have a deadline and won't be getting new resources any time soon, and what purpose does a estimate serve if you are already committed?

I didn't commit, the sales person did. I'm not in trouble, he and the company is. I can just leave, it is their fault if they make bad deadlines. The only reason they can continue is that engineers don't push back and quit when it happens. You work hard so that the sales person can get his juicy bonus, why should you do that?

The problem is sometimes we wouldn't get a customer unless we meet the deadline the customer requires. I'm fine with that. Most of the time, it's the sales team promising the world so that they get more bonus without having to pay the price for guaranteeing those promises.

There's a solution to that. Internal debiting between departments. Without it (as is usually the case now), sales is always seen as a net plus to the company, because they bring in new revenue, and can do no wrong.

With it, sales departments can spend more than they have, because they sell for X and need to pay production, IT and project management Y1, Y2 and Y3. An unrealistic deadline would put them in the negative due to overtime payments, attrition, etc. So would unclear requirements, failing to do their due diligence, selling science fiction...

You’ve just made an analogy to a situation that ~never happens in complex profession which ~none of us have direct experience in at a professional level. Thats fine, but it doesn’t really help with reasoning.

An estimate serves the purpose of allowing you to say “well the deadline is in 3 weeks and our best estimate is that this will take 9 weeks. Lets save ourselves the effort, cancel the project, and do something more profitable with our time.

In your analogy, that would be the equivalent of… jumping out of the airplane mid-flight, confident that you can just ride brooms to Iceland because thinking of this as a life-or-death decision is incorrect.

You don't really have a deadline in 3 weeks if you can make the choice to not do it. I was speaking to work that has already been committed to. Think things like changes in the law that you must adapt to or close the business.

In that case, 99% of deadlines are not what you'd call real deadlines. Even in your fantasy case, what often happens in the real world is regulators give more time for companies working to comply.

So if it helps you, just imagine here that we're talking about the 99+% case, rather than the extremely rare "real" deadline.

You could make a compromise. If you have a rough idea where you'll ditch, you can radio that to air traffic control and ships can be sent ahead of time so that when / if the ditching happens, they can to try to rescue people. Ships can act as bases for helicopters as well.

What would the business version of that be? Update your Linkedin, do some LeetCode?

In business, life goes on even if the project is late, there just has to be some accommodations. It's less painful the earlier it is known.

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