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Comment by doix | Hacker News Reader

I used to work in the semiconductor industry writing internal tools for the company. Hardware very rarely missed a deadline and software was run the same way.

Things rarely went to plan, but as soon as any blip occured, there'd be plans to trim scope, crunch more, or push the date with many months of notice.

Then I joined my first web SaaS startup and I think we didn't hit a single deadline in the entire time I worked there. Everyone thought that was fine and normal. Interestingly enough, I'm not convinced that's why we failed, but it was a huge culture shock.

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> I used to work in the semiconductor industry writing internal tools for the company. Hardware very rarely missed a deadline and software was run the same way.

Former Test Engineer here. It was always fun when everyone else’s deadline slipped but ours stayed the same. Had to still ship on the same date even if I didn’t have silicon until much later than originally planned.

Yep, you and layout folks drew the short straws.

What was the thing you were estimating? R&D?

I think you were estimating time to build things that were out of R&D and you had specifications that were actual specifications you were building up to.

In SaaS my experience is: someone makes up an idea not having any clue how existing software is working or is laid out, has no specifications beside vague not organized bunch of sentences. Software development team basically starts R&D to find out specifications and what is possible - but is expected to deliver final product.

I had the same experience when doing an exercise implementing `mmap` for `xv6` -- that was the last lab. There was no specification except for a test file. Passing that test file is relatively easy and I could game it. I consulted the manpage of `mmap` but it is pretty far from a specification, so eventually I had to write a lot of tests in Linux to figure out what it can do and what it can't do (what happens when I over-mmap? what happens when I write back pass EOF? etc.), and write the same tests for `xv6` so that I could test my implementation. Not sure about hardware, but it is really hard to get a clear specification for software.

This aligns with my experience in the semi industry. SWEs tend to see trimming scope as moving the goalpost and do not consider as an option. Providing advance notice is mostly about client management, and clients are often surprisingly receptive to partial solutions.

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