Name: Video recording for Deadlines & estimations: What do I do with them? - Codementor Events
Uploaded: 2022-02-07
Description: Developer advocates Vitaly Sharovatov and Rene Pot will talk about how to best handle deadlines and estimations throughout your developer career.

Developer advocates Vitaly Sharovatov and Rene Pot will talk about how to best handle deadlines and estimations throughout your developer career. 


## About the talk
  
  It’s impossible to go through your developer career without dealing with deadlines. As you gain more experience, you’ll have the opportunity to push back on deadlines with the management team. But before then, how can you handle estimations & deadlines better and what can you do when you fail to meet them?
  
  Vitaly and Rene will each give a 20-minute talk coming from a different perspective on this topic. We’ll then wrap up with a 10-minute Q&A with questions from you.
  
 ### This talk will cover
  
  - Why deadlines and estimations exist & why they might be harmful
  - How to appropriately define estimations and set deadlines
  - Tackling unrealistic deadlines and estimations
  

non-technical events about soft or workplace skills like communication skills

Essential Skills

### Why do we have estimations and deadlines?
The top 5 reasons why development teams and companies use estimations and deadlines is to see the team’s workload and capacity, public tender requires estimates, managers need to know when a feature is to be done, managers needs to understand how much a feature will cost (cost estimation), and managers need to be able to choose between features depending on cost. 


However, estimations may not be rational. For instance, when managers want to see the team load, what would they do? Would they give the team more tasks if the team finishes the tasks on time? Load doesn’t equal results. In fact, overloading the team with intellectual labor is actually counterproductive. Instead of loading the development team to their full capacity, it is more important to prioritize and do what’s of higher value and prevent the team from having to redo work. 


Lastly, managers tend to want to know when things will be done in order to work with other teams, such as marketing teams. More often than not, this information may not be needed and may actually be detrimental to the code quality. A healthier balance would involve the marketing team waiting for all features to be ready according to the development team, and then market for the product rather than the other way around. 


### What are some estimations' side effects?
Any estimation from the product and engineering team will be considered a promise, and what happens is the promise becomes a deadline. According to Goodhart's law, whenever you pick any measurable metric and use it in your management, that’s the metric that people will tend to hit rather than reach for the client's value. Furthermore, since estimations are seen as deadlines, people will naturally add buffer time to ensure they hit the target deadline, making deadlines convoluted.


Not only that, having heavy deadlines often causes people to burnout. If there is a tremendous amount of stress, developers will not be able to produce high quality intellectual labor. All of this means that deadlines ultimately harm performance and quality of work. As such, estimations should only be performed when there are proper values for estimations. 


### How to deal with unreasonable estimations and deadlines?
It is common for developer teams to run on an agile schedule where every two weeks, there would be a sprint. Depending on the company, the days of the schedule may be different, but essentially the cycle repeats every two weeks. What usually happens is, in order to keep up with the schedule and make the tickets that were planned, developers went into overtime regularly. 


The problem is that overtime does not fix the estimation. If you find yourself doing overtime, talk to your manager or anyone that is involved in the decision making. To do so, you can identify the problem by asking who’s making the estimations, who’s deciding on the deadlines, and who’s in charge of changing these. 


Once you’ve identified the stakeholders involved with setting your deadlines, communicate with your manager about delays and wrong estimates. If needed, over communicate the issues you’re experiencing on a daily basis. Let’s say you have a ticket with an estimated time of four hours. You’re two hours in and you’re nowhere close to half way of the ticket, talk to your manager immediately. Talk to your manager as soon as possible because you are the one liable for your own estimations. You also want to talk to your coworkers and see how they feel and see if they feel the change.


In order to deal with unrealistic expectations, make sure you avoid overtime at all costs. Expand your estimations with your managers and influence your coworkers. Also avoid finishing your tickets too fast so you don’t fall into the possibility of being overloaded with more tickets. If none of the above works, it may be time to find a new job. Of course, you also need to improve yourself. Why did you estimate it wrong? Did you do it on purpose or accidental? Make sure you learn from your mistakes and keep on improving these estimations.

Video recording for: Deadlines & estimations: What do I do with them?

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