Re:Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
by void_mint on Sunday September 26, 2021 @04:51PM
(#28664566)
Hardware and life science projects usually have more time to research and prepare than the hour of weekly estimation provided by silly agile orgs.
Also, how frequently do hardware and life science projects go far over budget and under scope? Do their estimates matter?
As I said, if you have $5MM, you'll get what you get for $5MM. If you want to spend a boatload of time researching, your estimate might be closer, but that research isn't free.
Re:Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
by smichel17 on Sunday September 26, 2021 @07:35PM
(#28665611)
> As I said, if you have $5MM, you'll get what you get for $5MM. If you want to spend a boatload of time researching, your estimate might be closer, but that research isn't free.
Knowing how far you'll get might affect what you prioritize, no?
Re:Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?
by gumby on Sunday September 26, 2021 @05:51PM
(#28664990)
> Also, how frequently do hardware and life science projects go far over budget and under scope? Do their estimates matter?
Most of the time, in my experience. At a bigger company that may not matter so much but at a startup it can be fatal.
This only works for some projects. For example if your MVP or go/no go prototype costs $5MM (which a hardware or life science product easily could) you really need to know if it will be 5 or 10.
I ran a company which always quoted 3X fixed price what we thought the project would really cost, even if things turned out to go wrong. Typically we made the (promised) schedule, and when not (luckily didn’t happen too often) the customer would be able to tell pretty much as soon as we could tell, and together we dealt with it.
But as for the cost: most projects were extremely profitable but sometimes we would lose hundreds of thousands on them. That’s why we charged such a premium: we absorbed the financial risk (not that we ever told the customers our internal cost estimate — none of their business!)