Manager: We (meaning you) need to do task A. How long will it take?
Me: Task A will take X days to do.
Manager: That seems awful long.
Me: How long do you think it should take?
Manager: It surely could not take any longer than Y days.
Me: Ok, it seems you have an answer to your question then.
Later:
Manager: It’s been Y days, why isn’t task A done yet?
You agreed with their timeline that is why you keep having these conversations.
Stand firm only your timeline and when they push back remind them that you are the engineer doing the work if the wait it done to their timeline then they should hire more people.
Brb, hiring more wifes so our baby takes less than nine months to come
Luckily software development is not pregnancy.
It’s a reference to The Mythical Man Month and (I believe) one of the parables told inside:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Yes, but not all time related problems are man power limited. Bottle necks come in many shapes and sizes
And manglement causes many of those.
Something that was difficult to capture in the post is the sheer level of sarcasm in my tone when I ‘agree’ to their timeline.
Or
Seems easy to me.
You may be correct but I’ve seen this work out before. You say you take x days, manager mentions " but that guy says he takes y days!!" in which makes you either slow in comparison or the other guy is a liar or makes stuff sloppy. Then you say " from my experience is x days" in which either the manager says you’re wrong or he goes to the other guy to do in y days, and when you look at the thing done in y days has a technical debt equivalent to the height of Niagara falls. And you know you will have to clean this later. At some point I walked away, sometimes managers just want a yes man, and I am straight up not that.