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Comment by tbrownaw | Hacker News Reader

< As a result, you sadly can’t be quite as precise in your estimates as we were in our coin tossing model. The coin tossing model is the best case scenario for how accurate our estimates can be, and most real world estimates will be even harder than that. >

An estimate for building a CRUD app is a lot closer to "how long will it take you to walk a mile?" than it is to "pick from this true-random distribution".

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What's the typical hour estimate range for building an MVP crud app? Professionally I have been working on developing custom functionality for WP sites and these projects rarely exceed 100h. I have been thinking about switching to web app development as I enjoy modern web technologies much more (especially TypeScript), can't work with PHP much longer. (I have not built a web app yet, but I have been working on an Electron desktop app for myself, which is a little more than a CRUD app and after 2,000h spent I estimate the total effort will take about 4,000 - 5,000h by the way). My guess would be 200h for something ultra simple and something around 500 - 1000 h for an average app with multi-user support?

Only if you’ve done it a couple of times before… which is the point about uncertainty. Estimates should become wider when you’re less certain of how that mile looks like. Is it a paved road or a mountain trail? How much work is it to figure this out?

Because it’s tiny. Tiny projects are uninteresting to estimate - you should be able to estimate them reasonably accurately.

How long will it take to build the new realtime risk engine? By the way, the team working on the FPGA deep pipeline calculators don’t think they’ll have a prototype for you before Christmas. How many devs do you need so that we’re we on track for March go-live so we avoid the $3mm/day fine for being late?

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