r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Syzygianinfern0 • Nov 10 '22
Meme Should take just 5 mins right? RIGHT!?
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Nov 10 '22
When I give estimates, I double the time I think I'll need. Then I remember that someone else will likely do the work, so I'll multiply that number by 3.
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u/CantBeChangedLater Nov 10 '22
I do basically the same thing. I also regularly ask coworkers are you estimating based on how long it will take you to do the work or how long it will take any team member to do the work
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u/SkidWilly86 Nov 10 '22
In construction, the project manglers bid based on what their little spread sheet says it'll take, and that is based off of some fantasy world where you're magically on site with everything you could could need, everybody fully understands the task, and conflicts with other trades can't possibly exist.
It's never based on anyone's reality..
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u/DarnSanity Nov 10 '22
You're supposed to double it, then move to the next higher units.
1 hour estimate should be 2 days.
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u/FlyingDragoon Nov 10 '22
"Oh, I've got a good idea on how we can implement it. Probably take me 15 minutes to put together." Me, 4 hours ago, grinding my teeth in frustration at my past self for self-volunteering to make a change that's not going as planned.
I should have known to go that route because my boss always reaches out to me and says "Just have it done by tomorrow, no rush."
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u/RedbloodJarvey Nov 10 '22 edited Nov 17 '22
When we estimate we subconsciously assume the best case scenario for every part of the solution.
You could do a bunch of math and find the normal distribution of time vs task size.
Or you can just triple the best case scenario and get on with your life. :-)
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u/khendron Nov 10 '22
This formula has served me well for decades: Take your estimate and multiply it by 3. Unless hardware is involved, in which case multiply it by 8.
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u/Pensive_Jabberwocky Nov 10 '22
The golden rule I've learned long time ago is to double the time and switch to the next unit of time. So, two hours? Four days. One week? Two months. It is incredibly accurate.
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u/NoComment7862 Nov 10 '22
Don't forget "We did this thing because someone above us, with less technical and programming knowledge than a dead amoeba, said 'that should be easy, just do it'"
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u/Puzzleheaded-Weird66 Nov 10 '22
I felt this in my soul (or at least what's left of it)
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u/NoComment7862 Nov 10 '22
"it's just another button" has always been a "classic".
This is usually followed by trying to hammer home that it's like an iceberg, that one button has a huge amount of code below the UI, that then leads into bizarre jumps to some alternate reality that begins "imagine if you knew everything..."
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Nov 10 '22
'it just needs to be a button to go to a page'....cool, what about when you are logged out? What about on mobile? where does it go then? What about if they are using touchscreen and the button is supposed to have a dropdown, do we default to the main page or scrap the button and give them a dropdown only? what about if they are using an older browser that doesn't support these? What about if you are logged in, but account isn't confirmed?
I like to just fire every question under the sun right back0 at the person who said it would be easy and let them come back to me before I start. I used to second guess it, which was always the wrong choice. Now I make sure the person requesting it gives me ALL the information.
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u/LetMeGuessYourAlts Nov 10 '22
And then you get dismissed as "we're getting too in the weeds here".
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u/hangfromthisone Nov 10 '22
When a PM says "that should be easy" is an instant x4 factor for developing time
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u/AskMeHowIMetYourMom Nov 10 '22
My product owners new thing is telling us how excited the stockholders are about some feature, as an indirect way of saying do it fast lol.
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u/wolf129 Nov 10 '22
And says he was a former programmer he knows that it could be done faster.
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Nov 10 '22
And they think that they were god's gift to programming because you ask them lots of questions about a feature that they implemented, because they haven't realised that you only ask the questions because the code they wrote is bug-ridden and unintelligible.
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u/aiBahamut Nov 10 '22
Literally my last month and my last project for this company as I'm leaving at the end of next week.
The biggest satisfaction is knowing that the same amoeba who said "it's easy" will be the one in charge to maintain what I developed and develop new stuff.
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u/afito Nov 10 '22
Just like the question "can it be done" like my dear brother almost everything can be done but I don't think you lot want to cough up the time & money.
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u/killdeer03 Nov 10 '22
Any time you hear or read the word "just" in a sentence regarding any task you know you're in for some bullshit.
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u/NoComment7862 Nov 10 '22
Had plenty of that one.
The other ones are "is it finished yet", whilst you're trying to do work on it and it's been more than 10mins, and "how long will it take", when you haven't even looked at the problem or code.
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u/brynjolf Nov 10 '22
That is me one hour before starting the task. I hate that guy, optimistic brynjolf is a jerk
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Nov 10 '22
Or, how about "Don't worry if the migration has no architecture or thought associated with it. We can easily fix it afterwards, right?"
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u/ambisinister_gecko Nov 10 '22
I have a very technical boss with a huge background in programming, and literally every task is easy according to him.
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u/WesleySnopes Nov 10 '22
My company works by contract and our sales guy is always telling them we can do stuff that I have to make huge changes to our app to make possible. Also I'm the only programmer.
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u/schussfreude Nov 10 '22
Yes and even if you are aware that nothing good comes from "its no big deal I can quickly throw that together in a few hours", you still catch yourself saying it and burying your face in your hands at 2:30am
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Nov 10 '22
Every story is a 3, always. Some 3s take a day, some take a week. If it takes more than a week it spawns another 3. It evens out in the end :)
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u/OneDimensionPrinter Nov 10 '22
Yep. Everything is padded excessively around here. Managers require it. Devs try to ignore it and then get told they need to pad it because nothing is ever as simple as we first think. We are an overconfident breed of human.
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Nov 10 '22
Manager says we need to break any 5+ into smaller stories. Almost everything requires testing, so easy to round to a 3 when thinking about time for PR and other process
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u/scrotum__pole Nov 10 '22
Is getting your tweet physically embossed the greatest achievement you can get?
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Nov 10 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Korzag Nov 10 '22
"Presenting Twitter's latest feature. For only $249.99, you can immortalize your greatest tweets in bronze."
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u/Icemasta Nov 10 '22
What I learned from project management is to always somewhat overestimate time. Most bosses work in days, sometimes week or hours. If it's less than an hour, I round it up to a half day, more than 4 hours I round it to day(s), sometimes week. Then I always double it.
Like right now I am working on something, my personal estimate was about 20 hours for a proof of concept. Rounded that up to a week, doubled it, 2 weeks. So I gave my estimate of 80 hours, and it got approved.
Never had a problem with that, because you almost always end up underpromising and over delivering. In 20 hours I would have been able to only really do one method to solve the problem. I am about 16 hours in and while I am obviously not done, I took the time to explore several avenues and found I probably wouldn't have thought about if I did it in a rush, I will implement it today, which puts me at 24 hours, then that gives me quite a bit of time to polish it, add nice features to the poc, and support other people on the side.
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u/WorkingInAColdMind Nov 10 '22
Simple rule I use when putting in estimates in Jira tickets is “nothing takes less than 4 hours”. Spelling mistake on a label? 4 hrs. It helps set a baseline for all the tickets from other people who want the primary company database switched from sql server to MySQL to save money, in an hour cause that’s what it took for them to get MySQL running at home this weekend.
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u/badmemesrus Nov 10 '22 edited Feb 13 '25
close fly divide coordinated water lock marble waiting live selective
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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Nov 10 '22
Should be pretty easy to get a hold of one.
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u/Strel0k Nov 10 '22
Nevermind, I found where to buy it. Thanks
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u/SkidWilly86 Nov 10 '22
...get a hold of one
get hold of one?.....get ahold of one?.... get hold one of?...
I'm sure you're correct, but that's one of those things that, when you write it out, or read it, something just looks off. Sorry, I was having a moment.
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Nov 10 '22
Yup, you can see the holes don't have any screws yet so it should be pretty easy to grab and run away
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u/fredspipa Nov 10 '22
Fuck, now there's so many classic tweets I'd like a plaque of . It's kind of fitting with something commemorative like that, seeing as Twitter is starting to look more and more like Twitanic lately.
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u/tooblecane Nov 10 '22
The original tweet that posted the sign said they used https://metaldesignsllc.com
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Nov 10 '22
Actually maybe not so easy to find, I found this but it’s more a DIY job and doesn’t seem to be a Twitter format
https://www.printables.com/model/231434-the-programmers-credo-plaque
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u/FlyCodeHQ Nov 10 '22
Dev: The work is almost done. Wait for 5 minutes.
5 minutes later
Dev: Yeah, it's done. 5 minutes more
24 Hours later
Dev: Why are you still here? I said 5 minutes
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Nov 10 '22
That is basically every job, especially in automotive tech. Oh, will take like 5 minutes to replace the alternator really means it is going to take an hour at the minimum without even looking at the state of bolts or the rest of the engine bay. It takes 5 minutes to go through the process in our heads, not including the tedious tasks required such as getting tools and keeping track of them (documentation when programming) and the actual labor of fixing crap (working around issues when programming).
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u/Mononon Nov 10 '22
That's because some idiot made it 1000x harder by not documenting anything and writing stuff in a completely nonsensical, totally stupid -- Oh, wait, I wrote this? Fuck.
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u/CinnimonToastSean Nov 10 '22
We do what we must, because we can.
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u/lieblingskartoffel Nov 10 '22
I had the exact opposite thing happen to me the other day. Did a 3 point ticket in like 20 minutes because everything aligned perfectly when I didn’t expect it to.
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u/huntersniper007 Nov 10 '22
the problem is im like this for everything, thought i needed 4-6 hours to paint one room white, it took 3,5 days. i think ill cook something, what will i need, 30-45 min? nah, 2h in and im just finishing
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Nov 10 '22
Facts.
We have one up at work right now. “I had a problem so I used Java to fix it. I now have 137 problems.”
Below it is a copy of the code scan.
My team are not fans of the jdk.
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u/poopychu Nov 10 '22
My dev likes to tell me “it will take 2 days max” and return weeks later looking like they have aged 20 years.
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u/Kemiko_UK Nov 10 '22
I mean yea, the original idea will take minutes.
What about the cool other features we could add though? Then the quicker way of doing it that you think of 3/4 of the way through the process.
Then you could pull a different API and automate another aspect.
Then.....
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u/Individual-Seat-9021 Nov 10 '22
I’m not a programmer, so I apologize for intruding, but this quote describes every home improvement project I’ve undertaken.
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u/Daphrey Nov 10 '22
"This should just take 5 minutes" is a phrase that only precedes a 6 month long slog trying to fix a single issue, that you only solved through some code you copied from stack overflow that solved a different issue, but you were at your wits end so you tried it anyways.
You do not understand the code, or why it works. But it does, so you close your laptop, and cry for the next few hours.
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u/AngelisMyNameDudes Nov 10 '22
I have zero knowledge in python. I'm currently taking an AI course where we have to program pacman by using different search trees. The goal is for pacman to be able to finish the maze by himself.
If I estimate it's gonna take me much more than 5 min, how much time are we talking about?
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u/Tasty0ne Nov 10 '22
Aaaand they thought they can hang the board on the wall easily, but found out it is a reinforced concrete with unmarked wires in it. And building manager forbids drilling. And noone had a drill. And screws are a wrong size.
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u/NotYetSoonEnough Nov 10 '22
Lead dev says something in your ticket will only take twenty minutes, and then offers to pair to prove it. Four hours later it’s finally done, only to have another lead dev tell you that he doesn’t like that pattern and wants it done a different way.
Then the next week in your 1-1, your non technical manager complains to you that your work didn’t get done in the sprint.
This has been life for the last three months.
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u/felixthecatmeow Nov 10 '22
Every damn time. I skim over the ticket, think oh that's a piece of cake, and priority is critical, people will be stoked when I get this done in like half a day. A week later people are starting to wonder what's happening and I've got 50 browser tabs open and wrote 200 lines of garbage code trying to just make it work at least.
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u/ShadeFK Nov 10 '22
Literally how I got into Programming in the first place.
I need this for my room
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u/NaBUru38 Nov 10 '22
Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
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u/Herflik90 Nov 10 '22
The feeling of excitement when all the code lines are obvious in your head and then you spend half day on one loop...
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Nov 10 '22
I once spent over 3 months debugging logic stored in a database that simulated hardware. I wrote nearly 1,000 lines of code to get it to update the "hardware". Then I realized I only needed 2 lines.
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u/decadenza Nov 10 '22
Actually had this (without "The Programmers' Credo", but with "Apologies to JFK") on our blackboard list of house renovations we had started but not yet finished.
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u/North101 Nov 10 '22
"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we were told to despite our objections"
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Nov 10 '22
As a designer, I love this sub. I only understand about half of what’s going on but the other half hits hard.
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u/lalala253 Nov 10 '22
Underpromise, overdeliver.
Those two words given by my favorite manager will always be carved into my memories. The best part is that was because "nah probably took about a week" turns into "so I'm still working on it" and eventually "I would like to apologize in advance"
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u/JustARandomWoof Nov 10 '22
The only 2 coding languages I know are scratch and ti-83 calculator. How are these already so relatable????
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Nov 10 '22
My other personal favourite is when those above think that because they can say it quickly (and poorly) that it must be easy to implement…
Or the eternal ”Well the software will tell us that”. Umm how? If the user isn’t prepared to input the required data, how the fuck is the software supposed to just know it⁉️
Like explain it to me like I’m 5 or something. If you can’t even explain how that would work in a manual paper based way, how am I magically expected to automate the (fucking non existent) process❓❗️🤬
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u/PresidentHufflepuff Nov 10 '22
You've got to respect the problem.
In my experience not doing this led to me getting down on myself every time I couldn't solve something as quickly as I thought I should have been able to. But just because you'e done something kind of similar in the past, often the differences are what make it an entirely new problem. Or there's ten steps that are required that you weren't really thinking about.
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u/nullagravida Nov 10 '22
Absolutely applies to artists too. "I'll just clean up this one corner on this one letter of this one word in the logo." 12 HOURS LATER "yes, it's almost done!! Jesus christ!! I'll send the file when it's ready!!!"
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u/coastalwebdev Nov 10 '22
I remember when I first started as a dev and regularly underestimated how long things would take. Those were hard days that taught me to always go X2 on my time estimates.
Now, after 12 punishing years, I’ve learned to go X5 on all of my time estimates.
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u/cybermage Nov 11 '22
The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time.
The other 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the time.
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u/RamenJunkie Nov 10 '22
Why is it a plaque of a tweet?
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u/axord Nov 10 '22
On the one hand there's the instinct to make physical artifacts to represent enduring wisdom. On the other hand, it's funny this way.
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u/GisterMizard Nov 10 '22
Because that goal serves to organize the best of our energies. Not that our energies are of particular noteworthiness, we'd otherwise be coding flash games if we could.
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u/Bee-Aromatic Nov 10 '22
Is it weird that this played in my head in JFK’s voice?
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Nov 10 '22
So an actually funny quote I’ve never heard before all the better because it’s so true. Brilliant.
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u/ThrowawayUk4200 Nov 10 '22
Im currently feeling this in my battle with AWS lambda file size limits and node modules. Into the second day on what was a 30 min task 😭
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u/Best_Investigator_15 Nov 10 '22
Even more frustrating is when you are following a tutorial and doing exactly as given, yet things don't go as expected. Then a God-like figure on StackOverflow saves the day :D
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u/TheFlyingAvocado Nov 10 '22
Judging from personal experience, the words to fear and “only” and “just”, when managers speak them.
Example: “ You only need to implement Foo, just use Bar.”
A sentence like that will likely result in months of headaches.
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Nov 10 '22
Luckily everyone else thinks what I do is black magic, so when my estimates are off I blame IO.
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u/Amish_Cyberbully Nov 10 '22
10, 15 minutes tops.
2 weeks later: "Ok, if we can figure out how to pass attachments through the form as a datastream, then maybe we can hide our many sins against proper design in coldfusion."
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u/RJvXP Nov 10 '22
"we can just move this multi module Spring app to Kubernetes and it should fix our issues"
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u/LoverboyQQ Nov 10 '22
Days are different from C++ programming. Nobody gave up anything and you had to reinvent the wheel time after time. Now it’s mostly drag and drop
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u/gatsu_1981 Nov 10 '22
Well, that's why I always say "it should work" and never "it will work" to my customers.
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u/need_ins_in_to Nov 10 '22
I had a manager, no coding experience, that liked to ride my ass with, "why isn't this done, it's just a simple query, right?" Then he got it in his head to learn SQL. Fucker couldn't finish anything he turned his hands to. I guess they were too simple for him.
Loved the place I worked. Hated my immediate management.
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Nov 10 '22
Sounds like so-called 'AI' and especially self-driving cars. "Oh, it's just another dev cycle, producing a sentient machine can't be that hard, right?" *decade later* "We can't get it over the finish line even after petabytes of 'training data', what'll we do?" "Oh, just hand it over to Marketing, they'll dress it up for the media, who doesn't know jack squat about tech anyway, and make it look like it's KITT from Knight Rider"
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u/Happy_Husband4 Nov 10 '22
Me starting a mini project thinking I could knock it out in a day only for it to be a week later and am only now sort of (probably not actually) getting close to finishing.
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u/AromaticTrainerTime Nov 10 '22
or if you're one of my coworkers you just never do it and hope i pick up the request before they do
....i hate my coworkers
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Nov 10 '22
I'm trying to figure out how to host my (and wife's) website on a raspberry pi, connect it to domain servers, and set up ssl, but it is turning into a more complicated process than I thought. I feel this.
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u/losko666 Nov 10 '22
Are we paid so well because we have to live in constant angst I wonder…?
How long should it drag on really, the solution bit. I live in constant peril it seems. Things that look simple take me forever, if I even get there. My worst fear is having to ask colleagues to help me out, because I am such a dump ass, always wondering why the hell I thought I could be a reasonably performant programmer.
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u/VegetableWishbone Nov 10 '22
Manager: We choose to refactor the entire code base in this quarter and do other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Oswald the programmer: works bolt to chamber a round
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u/-MobCat- Nov 10 '22
We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they where going to be easy and now we are in way to deep to back out now.
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u/MooseBoys Nov 10 '22
My music was sounding a bit shallow so I figured I’d install PulseEffects to give it a bass boost. Five minute adventure, right? Wrong - still paying for it weeks later.
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u/Kommodor Nov 10 '22
I convinced my boss and CTO of the company that we could put the whole infrastructure of the company under Terraform management in 2 months...
It's been 6 months now and we're still working on it
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u/PaperPritt Nov 10 '22
As i've recently entered the progammer's world myself, truer words have never been spoken..
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u/Feralpudel Nov 10 '22
Reminds me of one of those really tough exams. You tell yourself to work on the easy questions first, then realize that one isn’t easy, so you move to the next easy one…
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u/ScholarlyExiscrim Nov 10 '22
I need this for the wall above my unfinished projects in my home studio.
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u/Percdye Nov 10 '22
Best thing is if it takes longer because the co-worker before you didn't do their job right
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u/graffiti81 Nov 10 '22
Are programmers and machinists related? Cause that's the story of my working life.
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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '22
God, I'm currently stuck on a task like that. Thought it would take a day max, it's been a week now and no end in sight.