Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How Does Floatplane Launch Updates on Time? (It Doesn’t)”.
Luke, what processes do you have in place? Oh boy, to help your development teams actually accurately forecast delivery timelines, any any implementation tips, I’m going to say no oops, uh, sorry what what was the last? What was the last line? Any implementation tips any implementation, uh. What? What oh man, good luck? Uh James, have fun so yeah welcome to the world of developer timelines. Uh. They don’t work. It’S it’s like the. Whose Line Is It Anyways points? They don’t matter? They don’t exist. Um they’re made up they they’re made up. You start getting used to different people on your team and like how good like that person is at estimating time some teams can find um systems like they’ll they’ll, start like Point scoring things, and a lot of teams will use different uh types of Point scoring that They can have people are saying scrum for the win. Yeah.
Good luck that doesn’t I I don’t find personally that that scrum actually helps you there’s a lot of issues with scrum in my opinion, but I don’t. I don’t actually find that scrum itself helps. You estimate actual completion time of large projects that need multiple scrums to actually like be completed. Like maybe, and and I mean you estimating the amount of time that it’s going to take at the beginning of the project, because some people will cheat and be like.
Well, we know how much we can do do roughly every 2 weeks and then that’s slightly inaccurate every time. So by the end, the Assumption we made at the beginning is really wrong, but our assumptions along the way were pretty good. So therefore, we did a good job and it’s like well. No, because we’re talking about the Assumption you made at the beginning compared to what the reality was at the end of it anyways um. But you can. You can do like the best one that I’ve heard of is when teams start looking at jobs, and they do a point scoring thing. So they try to assume the amount of like blocks of time that something will take. So they don’t do it by hour. They do it by like half day or full day or something like that um and they use that as project estimating, and then they review that after every project that they do to try to help themselves get more and more accurate over time. That is helpful. For teams that often do at least somewhat similar things if you’re constantly doing very, very different things all the time. It’S still going to be really tough to estimate.
Um. I’Ve actually found that I’m more successful when I just get used to roughly how inaccurate individuals are and then don’t actually coach them on doing it at all and just have them keep doing their estimates as they have been, and then buffer custom amounts per person. And then I found that’s actually pretty good, I’m I’m pretty accurate that way, um as a blanket rule, I always add either 2X or two weeks, whichever one feels more correct for the situation add two weeks to it or double the amount of time that developer says They think it’ll take um. A lot of developers are a little bit overconfident um or don’t necessarily fully consider testing time.
Uh different things like that needing to go back and and refine things or or whatever else um, so just give them a little bit of extra time because you don’t want them to you, don’t want the blow of like it’s late. We need it now when they actually just want to do a good job, um yeah, so someone in Philippine chapter said as a Dev. I always feel bad when I underestimate time exactly so. If you’re leading devs try to set them up for success by hopefully putting them in a situation where that’s not really going to happen by buffering for them, one of the best ways to do this is not actually share the full communication with either end.
Don’T tell the devs that you buffered extra time for them until they run out of time and don’t tell the people that you’re agreeing to do the project for that. You buffered anytime, just tell them buffered amount and then you end up delivering a little bit early and then, when the dev ran out of time you can magically give them extra time. And then everyone on each end is happy and you just it’s all fine.
So basically, your career advice is live through your oh, so basically, your commun, your career advice is lie through your te. No, it’s just correctly estimate and know the people that you’re working with I see yeah, hey Luke, I’m a self-taught software engineer who started my professional career about a year ago. What are your thoughts on companies that crunch to meet deadlines and how does float plane? Compare? I mean we’ve done it um, it’s extremely uncommon.
Like extremely. I don’t remember the last time, we’ve done it and when we do it, it’s generally, not me driven if that makes sense um. I I recognized a long time ago that I actually enjoy those activities cuz. I don’t know my brain’s broken or something um, but that gener that is significantly frowned upon, so I have taken on a a stance of like if other people are just doing it by default. I will generally, you know, join in and not stop them, but I try not to impose it because I think that’s bad. I think we’re also fairly blessed to be in an industry where we mostly set our own deadlines for things um. I think you run into some problems in things like the gaming industry when you’re announcing the launch of a game and then say you discover issues with the game ahead of the launch and you’re like. Oh, my goodness, we need to fix all this stuff or whatever uh, so you announce the launch of a game and then you do a play test and it’s horrible, so you’re trying to improve it for whatever reason then you’re crunching. Because of that, like there’s, there’s a lot of Industries where crunch is more real for for more real reasons. If that makes sense, maybe your piece of software has to match up with a piece of hardware and uh you’re a driver team GPU.
You need to be ready on time for the launch or whatever like there’s, there’s there’s situations where it can maybe make sense as as annoying and frustrating as it is. It can maybe make sense. I don’t think it often makes sense with float plane um.
I can appeal to you guys and I’ve done it where we I’m I’m saying we’re going to work on something, and then we end up working on something else or or we we make some change uh and then I just like you know, apologize to you guys On wancho, explain why we made the change, what we’re pivoting to what you guys can get instead, Etc, and then people are usually actually pretty cool with it, and I appreciate that and that saves our developers from crunch um, not entirely yeah. It helps, though, sometimes they crunch, even when you tell them not to explicitly, which is frustrating, be a genuine, very large problem. Cuz people will burn out from that and I’m like well hold on.
I’M telling you not to keep working. It’S not. This is not reverse. Psychology, actually don’t do that yeah, like don’t work on the weekend, take your weekend off.
It’S actually better for all of us, like just just don’t my favorite line. We we had an employee at one point that was very problematic that way and my favorite line with them was always just like you’re, no good to me dead. Yeah um, like I, don’t know how to be more explicit than just don’t yeah yeah, it’s um and it’s frustrating because I think there’s some like human spirit in the the desire to like push really hard to help the team and stuff like that. Like I get it, I understand it’s it’s driven by positive things, yeah, but it can.
But I need you to be here on Monday and functional and happy yeah. I don’t want to it’s it’s like. I don’t want to. I don’t it’s not constructive for anyone if you’re like cranky and burnt out yeah or if you like, Miss things in your personal life because you’re pushing for it and then those people are complaining at you and then therefore you’re upset and all this kind of stuff. That resentment makes it back to work it’s like, but I didn’t ask you to do that yeah, so so we’re a little bit privileged to be in a situation where we’re not running into situations too often where it’s like super super required y uh. Other other Industries are not as privileged, and I think sometimes those Industries will recognize that they’re in that state and then abuse it yeah, because people getting into that industry will understand that that will happen, but they don’t necessarily understand how much will happen.
Cu. The company leans on it intentionally and that’s really bad, but it’s also not always true. I don’t know it’s just .