Re:The Hard Part of Learning a Language
by commandlinefan on Saturday May 30, 2020 @10:06AM
(#23361269)
> I've stopped scoffing at a simple app that I think I can "hack together in a weekend"
How do you get your PM to stop planning that way, though?
Find a better PM.
The competent ones I’ve worked with invariably convince engineers their “weekend project” will take at least 2 months. They start by getting the engineer to spend an afternoon enumerating all the tasks they need to complete to implement and ship it.
Then the engineer takes 3 months, when they would have taken 6 without help from the PM. This is because the PM follows up, and helps them be ruthless with the requirements list.
The more experienced I get, the primary transformation I see in myself is being less dismissive of existing work that I wasn't involved in.
Were they insanely time crunched? Was this a prototype by a lawyer who painstakingly taught himself Excel and then taught himself Python again to port the Excel sheet he had into a service? Were the abstractions they chose based on whatever was the best practice at the time?
I've stopped scoffing at a simple app that I think I can "hack together in a weekend". No I can't. There are complexities and corners I don't see at the moment.