Many, many moons ago I asked my mentor how to estimate. He told me that you should figure out what it feels like, then double it and then take it to the next higher time unit.
"hmm, adding that button probably takes about an hour"... 2 days is about right.
Almost 30 years later I still find this to be true. Truer than I like.
You don’t want them interacting with you too often for one hour tasks. You want to train them to lower resolutions slices. And you want to round up small ones to do refactoring as well.
Eventually they get a sense of just right. It’s never perfect but they are estimating before they even ask. Whic if we’re honest, they’ve done anyway and they’re hoping we will agree, absolving them of the responsibility.
Not that I've used this extensively, but months would likely increase to quarters.
And if you're estimating something to the lengths of months, you're already into project management territory size, rather than broken down to development/delivery sizes... The amount of unknown unknowns and other uncertainty certainly warrant happily estimating years length, surely.
In Germany its 50 cases per 100'000 in a borough. After that lock downs are supposed to happen again. (with discretion, if, for example, cases can be isolated)
What other country do you think of that doesn't have clarity?
To me, it is definitely unclear what the goal is in Germany. Is it eradication like New Zealand? Is it controlled herd immunity? Remember that Merkel said that around 70% of the population will get infected anyways. If that’s true, hospitals should not be empty. Instead controlled infection should take place. But that’s not what we have seen. We have seen an eradication strategy. Highly confusing
Because they are another form of coupling which is hellish to get out of if you want stuff to be portable, which as we found out when SQL pricing went through the roof is definitely a desirable feature in your application...
Also we use an ORM (NHibernate) which abstracts the entire query and schema away from us. We load/perf test that and get on with life. If there are any blockers, it's 99.9% architectural or loading related which we cover with test cases.
For us, the database is the hole we put our shit in when we don't want it in memory any more. Nothing more.
In your other comment, you mention that "our hefty DB cluster has lots of cores", and that this caused licensing to be much more expensive. Have you considered that maybe the abstractions and attitudes you're using have inflated the amount of hardware you need?
NHibernate, for example, can make it extremely easy to generate extremely poorly-performing queries. It often takes much more care and effort to have it generate mediocre queries than it takes to write good queries and any binding code by hand.
The "abstracts the entire query and schema away from us" and "database is the hole we put our shit in when we don't want it in memory any more" attitudes don't help reinforce the idea that you guys know how to use relational databases properly.
When teams go out of their way to remain as ignorant as possible about relational databases, while also using abstractions that are often inefficient, they shouldn't be surprised if their hardware needs (and their licensing costs, in some cases) balloon due to this inefficiency.
The question is, what's cheaper- labor for optimizing the queries + paying (possibly reduced) SQL server licensing, or keeping the "mediocre" queries + throwing in more hardware?
99% of the hinting I've seen people "need" was not needed at all, it was just the lazy way to temporarily work around a bad query plan. Other than actual bugs in the query planner, I can't even invent a hypothetical scenario where the tools postgresql already gives you to influence the query planner couldn't solve a problem.
You're not too far off. Companies have to, with growing size, do more and more stuff in french. At large companies that aren't exempt you must have a french keyboard for example and code comments have to be in french.
Any large company should have a policy document which states the absurd rules including installation of French software versions and use of French keyboards, hiring and e-mail policies. I believe the policies only apply to businesses with over 50 employees so you would not have encountered them in the public sector.
I just went through my activity log on Facebook, because it knew I shared it a while ago. It was mid November, I got it from a German Radio station. (It wasn't played a lot back then though) Not trying to be all hipster and stuff but: "Called it!"
"hmm, adding that button probably takes about an hour"... 2 days is about right.
Almost 30 years later I still find this to be true. Truer than I like.