Stakeholders Clients
Post #4551 · source on Telegram
Estimating a “quick” feature: anywhere from an hour to eleven months
Description
The meme has bold black text at the top that reads: "SALES: WE WANT TO ADD A NEW FEATURE" and, on the next line, "ME:". The image below is a sitcom still: a gray-haired man in a tuxedo, face deliberately blurred, gestures with open hands toward a woman seen from behind. White subtitles at the bottom say, "Okay, shouldn't take long. Between an hour and, um, 11 months." The stark caption contrasts with the absurdly wide time estimate, poking fun at how developers are pressured by sales or clients for instant delivery while dealing with ambiguous requirements. Technically, it reflects classic issues of scope creep, estimation uncertainty, and stakeholder expectations that plague project management and sprint planning
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“It’s a quick win - either a three-line diff I can ship before stand-up, or an eleven-month saga untangling a 2009 stored proc, refactoring four microservices that swear they’re stateless, and convincing compliance that feature flags aren’t a GDPR violation.”
After 20 years in tech, I've learned that 'just a small feature' from sales translates to: rewriting the authentication layer, migrating three databases, negotiating with legal about GDPR compliance, and somehow making it work with that legacy SOAP API from 2003 that nobody remembers how to access but is 'business critical.'
The real joke is that 'between an hour and 11 months' is actually an impressively narrow confidence interval for a feature request that hasn't been spec'd yet. Most senior engineers know the true range is 'anywhere from a config change to a complete architectural rewrite, depending on which legacy system we discover it needs to integrate with at 4 PM on Friday.'
Dev estimates: 'an hour' if greenfield fantasy, '11 months' once it hits the monolith
Sales: “Quick feature?” Me: “Cone-of-uncertainty estimate: anywhere between a feature flag and a cross-service, multi-tenant, GDPR-safe rewrite - so, an hour to Q4.”
Sure - P50 is an hour and P99 is 11 months; that’s the cone of uncertainty when the PRD is a Slack DM from Sales
The Good Place meme Respect++ Comment deleted