16 January 2003

The Hacker FAQ 4.1: I can't get an estimate out of my hacker. Your hacker hasn't figured out how hard the problem is yet. Unlike most workers, hackers will try very hard to refuse to give an estimate until they know for sure that they understand the problem. This may include solving it. The Manager FAQ 3.6: I'm stuck, and my manager won't stop pressuring me to get unstuck. The best solution I've ever heard is to ask your manager what happens if he loses his keys. How long will it take to find them? Once he's done looking everywhere he can think of, why doesn't he keep looking in all those places over and over and over? This is the best analogy to difficult creative work that most people will have had experience with. 5.4: My manager counts from one. Ordinals (counting numbers) have always started from one; counting from zero, while obvious and natural to many programmers, is probably wrong from a linguistic standpoint. Try to be flexible. 7:19:17 PM

© Copyright 2003 Jamie Cansdale. Last update: 01/02/2003; 11:09:37.