Anyone else gets PTSD from estimating time expenses on projects you know nothing about, no basic design, specification, or anything besides “this page of the app is called the request handler, it handles requests by other users.” Oh really? Like what kind of requests? What can they request? Who can approve those requests? Etc... Is this normal, or am I just at an unprofessional company with fully incompetent PMs?

Sometimes, you have to put PMs into place and remind them to do their part of the job, which is saying WHAT they want. As long as they don't know that, there's no point in anything else.

When they don't know what they want, you start high. (Say... 3 years)

Then as they define the requirements you can work backwards and slowly turn that into 1-4 weeks.

@C0D4 I’d gladly see the meltdown on my PM’s face when I tell them it’s gonna take 3 years :D but yeah, you got a point

I also questioned how you would be able to do it before.

But at my job, we have a first refinement where we are presented with all feature request and get to do a rough estimate.

One of the options is “?” Indicating we believe its to vague to do an estimate on and we are then expected to provide a couple of questions we need answered, and sometimes we even need to sit down with the people requesting the feature to clarify the request and also present what problems we see that might require the request to be simplified, or broken down into steps where we start by building a much more simple solution in the interim while investigation possibilities.

@Voxera Yep, that’s how it should work imho... now I only need to get my PM to see this himself, because this current workflow only leads to misunderstandings and horrible overestimates

@Thorzilla try o find pages supporting your standpoint. It might lend you some weight, especially if you find one focused on business values.

In the end, well defined requirement that stay within the realm of possible gets faster and better end results than wishful thinking and fragile hacks.

Me decided to start my blog on wordpress. Now xampp is acting up to even start. What have I gotten myself into 😐

@idkm Why would you use WordPress for a blog? Because of the comments? Otherwise, just use an SSG.

Currently we are faced with an even worse situation. We should submit a bid for "Preparing computers with software" project and we need to submit a time estimate. However, the requirements should be determined after we sign the contract as the second step in the project. The first being that we need to sit with the client to agree on the objectives of the project!
How the hell are we supposed to estimate the time for a project if the objectives are not even decided?!

@kabbura that’s some advanced dumbfuckery

@idkm buy 5 dollar hosting, why you are hosting on ur pc?

@zemaitis Cos still under development and broke af 😶