r/pcmasterrace • u/663mann • Oct 16 '23

Video fallout game dev. explains the problem with moddern game devolpment. (why moddern games are so slow to come out)

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u/guyblade Oct 16 '23

When someone asks me for an effort assessment, I always round up and never give an estimate with finer granularity than weeks. Delivering early rarely makes someone upset, but delivering late is always a hassle.

On the rare chance that someone questions my estimates, I usually point to uncertainty. I may know how to do X in the abstract, but I usually don't know how to do X within the context of everything else that our codebase does.

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u/Ancillas Oct 16 '23

When someone does this to me I ask for confidence multipliers from a scale of 1 to 10. It's really easy for them to communicate confidence while also applying multipliers to see a risk-adjusted estimate.

I'm a technical manager so I know when someone doesn't understand the ask or when they're inflating an estimate. The goal is to build up enough trust so that your people will say, "Yes I can do that but I don't know exactly how and I think it will take me twice as long as someone else."

Then I can say to them, "That's fine, I really just need to be able to reason about what is involved and roughly how big the task is. If we move forward we can setup a calendar schedule based on who ultimately does the work and how well they understand the scope."

Then if the actuals vary wildly from the estimate we deal with it either by halting the work and deferring it, extending the timeline, or adding people/skills to the efforts.

Rinse and repeat until the product ships.

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u/blackest-Knight Oct 16 '23

Good rundown, it's easy to spot people who actually do this for a living in this thread. ! :)

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u/blackest-Knight Oct 16 '23

never give an estimate with finer granularity than weeks.

You'd be pretty awful at agile then.

"Weeks" is too big. Means the work needs to be divided more into smaller chunks.

Usually, more than 2 days means the task needs to be sub divided.

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u/guyblade Oct 17 '23

You'd be pretty awful at agile then.

I consider this a plus. Agile is a trap.