I’m sitting on the sofa with my wife. We just watched the second episode one of the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series (1966). It’s surprisingly good!
As an employee it pains me to watch Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and see Sisko ask engineering for an estimate; the Chief says it’s going to take 10h and the captain replies: “you have 2h” – and everybody goes along with that as if this is the natural state of things, or the expected heroism of the common employee, instead of the Chief saying: “fuck this shit why are you asking for an estimate if it never ever seems to influence your decisions?”
I guess the reason it grates so much is that asking for estimates and having “the team” commit to them is how self-discipline and overtime is achieved: a little nudge to adjust the estimate but then the same kind of “we committed to it so let’s do it” is always in the air – even if most of my project managers end up saying we need to improve our estimates they also groan when I tell newbies to just double their numbers. Estimates are important and cut both ways.
I do understand project managers asking the rhetorical question because they wish to be reassured – which obviously always fails in the movie because the war is on (hopefully not in your daily life!) – and from this point of view Sisko is just telling the Chief how it is: he would have wished to have 10h but sadly 2h is all we get. They need our help!
At the same time, I hate crunch normalization. Project managers should protect their team from crunch, not lead them into it. That’s bad planning!
I remember a kickoff meeting years ago where the tech project lead on the customer side (consultants) was giving us the pep talk about the project starting, and us giving our all and working day and night to get it done – I said that I just wanted to work during the day and I’d consider working during the night to be a project management failure… awkward silence! 😂
It all went well in the end. But I’ll always remember that moment.
#Programming
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Plenty of people on Mastodon told me about the Scotty Factor. 😀
– Alex 2021-12-13 22:00 UTC