I got eight out of ten. I thought that the Pacific coastline was much shorter (but I was imagining it as basically a smooth curve, and terminating it at the Bering Strait and somewhere down near India—is that how they measured it, I wonder?), and I thought blue whales were much less heavy. Now I have to go find out how something that weighs 190 tons manages to propel itself!
I was surprised by one particular aspect of the blog comments; the recurring theme of “I don’t think it’s valuable to make estimates like this, because if I ever gave a project estimate of ‘two to twenty weeks’ I would be laughed out of the room.”
What do you mean, you would be laughed out? If you’re 90% confident that it’s two to twenty weeks, then you should feel OK about saying so—that’s better than confidently saying “five weeks” and watching it turn out to be twenty! At least it should be better. It’s a shame if people feel compelled to whitewash guesses like that to save face.
I got eight out of ten. I thought that the Pacific coastline was much shorter (but I was imagining it as basically a smooth curve, and terminating it at the Bering Strait and somewhere down near India—is that how they measured it, I wonder?), and I thought blue whales were much less heavy. Now I have to go find out how something that weighs 190 tons manages to propel itself!
I was surprised by one particular aspect of the blog comments; the recurring theme of “I don’t think it’s valuable to make estimates like this, because if I ever gave a project estimate of ‘two to twenty weeks’ I would be laughed out of the room.”
What do you mean, you would be laughed out? If you’re 90% confident that it’s two to twenty weeks, then you should feel OK about saying so—that’s better than confidently saying “five weeks” and watching it turn out to be twenty! At least it should be better. It’s a shame if people feel compelled to whitewash guesses like that to save face.