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Mr. Tycho Brahe observes: We must, as conscious beings, observe when we are told things that are strategically lathed not to inform us but to make us fight with one another.

It's already happened in America. Most manufacturing jobs have either become automated or outsourced. Most people work in the service industry. Same thing will happen in China.

Gazprom is aggressively and heroically working to remove the methane from the ground in that region. With any luck, they'll be able to remove it all so we can burn it before anything goes wrong.

That is the most optimistic thing I've read all week. It hasn't been a century yet, the time for the third bomb is coming.

Practice doing it, and soon you'll be able to do it accurately yourself. Think of a typical website.....the content is different, but the structure is just a bunch of pages, storing stuff in a database, maybe doing some authentication. A difficult project would be inventing a new algorithm. That's rare, and working on projects that are completely unrelated to anything you've done before is equally rare.

If you're working on a two-week sprint, by practicing and noticing how accurate your estimates were, then within two months you'll find that 80% of your estimates are accurate.

Caveat emptor: if you have a manager constantly pushing to make your estimates shorter, then learning to make accurate estimates is very hard.

You are not responsible to meet any estimates you don't make. If your manager makes your estimate, let him meet it.

Yeah, but you're just some guy.

No. I don't think many people work in that kind of shop.
No excuses. Don't use that as an excuse for bad estimates, it's something you can improve.

Yes, think of the standard pattern:

1) Embrace.
2) Extend.
3) Extinguish.

This fits perfectly in the pattern, it is an echo of "Developers, developers, developers!", it is exactly what you would expect from Microsoft when they realize they are back to the Embrace step.

Thanks!!

Then teach your manager to be better. Reject the corporate structure (it may shift many times while you work at a company, even though not much else changes. That is an indication it's not particularly real), accept that improvement can come from even the lowliest programmer, and then help your manager do better.

If you think that your manager is completely bad in every way, you're not going to be able to help him. You need to be honest, recognize his strengths, and help him overcome his weaknesses.

You'll probably also need to overcome some of your own weaknesses, unless you are perfect. I can tell you one way to not accomplish anything: start a twitter campaign telling the world how bad your boss is. That will not make your system better.

When estimates are accurate, projects get done on time. Then business trusts programmers, money is made, and life becomes better.

You can improve. Most programming we do is boring, and similar to something we've done before. For things like that, you should be able to make your estimates reasonably accurate.

Sometimes projects have large unknowns, and it's impossible to know how long it will take. In that case you need to propagate that information up to the people who need it, either managers or salespeople or whatever.

Estimating is a crucial skill for developers. If you don't have it, you'll make bad decisions. For example, answer the question, "should I use framework A, or should I write some code myself?" If you can't estimate how long it will take to use the framework and compare it to how long it will take to write the code yourself, then it is impossible to make a realistic decision. Similarly, "should we write the code using method A, or write the code using method B?" If you don't know how long they take then you can't make good decisions.

This is a trick I learned from agile (although I'm sure it's been around longer than that). Each time you make an estimate, pay attention to how accurate it was, then next time adjust and make a better estimate based on that. Estimating shouldn't take much of your time.....if it does, then you're doing it wrong.

These guys seem to be complaining that their managers aren't doing anything with the estimates. Which probably means they don't understand what the managers do (but it could also mean their managers are bad).

I'm not sure I understand this point, in my experience, the network on Android is as fast as the network on iOS. What am I missing?