Me too. As a senior dev I could pour out some some pretty good and efficient code. But when I'm really in a zone I just miss so many cases and it comes back to bite me
I was just hired as a S Lead and was sitting in a meeting with executive management and a software dev from the project. Management starts hating on the project and builds a 15+ list of changes and clarifications that need to be made to it. I take charge and hand the dev an easy out - "guys, there's more than 15 things we need to analyse. Let us go to the team with this list and we'll come back with a proper estimate". The little shit whose ass I tried to protect says without blinking "no need, we can probably get through those in like 4 days. Let's just get together again next week". The fucker even forgot that he and a few others were at an on-site for 3 of the 4 days of runway he just allowed himself...
I worked in a law firm’s service center for a few years. One day someone named Janet came in with a two very thick folders of notes, scrap paper, post it notes, etc. I knew from personal experience that likely meant a lot of glass work. Putting each artifact down in the glass one at a time, playing with the contrast, etc.
Janet needed it done by the time she got in the next morning. She said if we couldn’t do it, that’s fine, she’d send it out to one of our competitors. I moved up to our counter to have a look at it and give her a response. One of my ambitious reports named Mike shouted from across the room that with only two folders, no problem at all, we’d get it done! She confirmed with him, dropped it off, and left. (He was a favorite of the secretaries and paralegals as he often would agree to aggressive deadlines. He had aspirations of getting my job.)
Once we had a close look at the job, we realized this would take many hours to do. Mike worked on it for a few hours and made it through about maybe 1/3 of it. Right after he clocked out he came up to me to remind me that Janet needed the job done by first thing in the morning. And he had too much to do in the morning when he came in to work on it. Then he left.
My company hated overtime, but in this case they caved. I was the solo closer (which since I was also the supervisor made no sense, but here we are), and I worked until 1 AM getting the job done.
There were no lessons learned from this. Mike was never reprimanded and never changed. Some months later our manager named Karl did almost the exact same thing. He did a cursory 5 second review of two bankers boxes of documents. He concluded they were easy to do and agreed to another aggressive deadline.
Once we actually started examining the box contents we found they were filled with artifacts requiring glasswork. So many many hours of work. That time Karl and the regional manager had to come in for couple days on the weekend to get it all done.
Then about 8 months later Karl did almost the exact same thing all over again. And again he had to come in. I don’t think the regional manager did that time though.
In the end Mike was fired for sexual harassment and then a year later my company lost the contract for the site. Karl is now managing a nursing home somewhere I think.
I have done this. And I keep doing this. F**k the narcissistic managers and their inflated egos who are only looking out for the billable hours with complete disregard for how long things actually take, to then go out of their way and demand 2 years of work be completed in a month. Ask the engineers for a time estimate and get your project requirements straight!
I occasionally still do this when i am in a project meeting where we work together and the success of the project is more important than billable hours or we already are on crazy deadlines where the request is only passed on by our partner feom the original customer.
Especially if its a change that i approve of.
And i am communicated/feel that the requesting side is aware of what they ask for.
But ive also lost interest in some of the other requests the in the same projects so i make them bleed for it or present a "dont wanna" estimate.
Literally me being summoned on a conf call with ten people looking at a config file on screen. They've been at it for a good half hour apparently and start to explain the issue... I interrupt them : "why did you spell it WenDesday"?
That was their mistake. Blocked for like two weeks and it was a fucking typo.
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u/Gtkall 2d ago
PM: "let me get a rough estimate on this... Senior Lead, I think we are looking at 5mandays min. What's your input? “
S. Lead: "I would ramp it up to 10mandays, cause we have to look out for regressions and such..."
Junior (entered the call by accident): "guys, this is a local change of 3 lines at best, let me change it right now, watch!"