Software estimation Memes

The eternal struggle of explaining Brooks' Law to management who think software development is like cooking chickens. Sure, you can crank up the heat to 900°F and cook it in 1 hour, but the result is a charred, inedible disaster. Meanwhile, the proper approach at 300°F takes 3 hours but yields something actually usable. Same logic applies to dev teams: throwing 2 more developers at a late project doesn't make it 3x faster—it makes it slower. Why? Communication overhead scales quadratically. With 3 devs you have 3 communication channels, with 5 devs you have 10. Plus there's onboarding time, context switching, merge conflicts, and the inevitable "wait, who changed this file?" Slack messages. The PM sees "3 devs = 3x speed" but reality delivers a burnt chicken that nobody wants to merge into production.

The four horsemen of software estimation in their natural habitat! The noob, still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, thinks everything can be done in a day. Bless their optimistic little heart. The junior dev has learned to pad estimates—3 days should cover those unexpected Stack Overflow deep dives and the inevitable "why isn't this working?!" moments. The senior dev doesn't even bother with numbers anymore. Just grunts "uhh... size: story" because they've been burned too many times by the cosmic law that states: however long you think it'll take, multiply by π and add a random number of meetings. And finally, the principal engineer, who's seen enough estimation disasters to last twelve careers, is genuinely shocked people are still playing this dark ritual of pretending we can predict the future. "You guys give estimates??" Translation: "I stopped playing that game years ago when I realized software estimation is just astrology for programmers."