Post #1261257

2026-03-24 17:30 UTC

In such cases, it makes the company and the software authors look incompetent and clueless about their own domain, whereas they should present the exact opposite. This doesn't mean that your plan or your calculations don't contain such precision, but there is an art to presentation logic and UX that has been developed over many decades — as well as experimental science and metrology over centuries — that often seems thrown out the window when it comes to presenting something in a window.

Replies (2)

@kevlin@mastodon.social 2026-03-24 17:37

I still remember a moment about 10 years ago (note that I say "about 10 years ago" and not "about 3652 days ago") when a project manager showed me a plan that showed me progress on a task that had been estimated at around 2 months. "We're 52.5% complete on this task," she told me. That many significant figures on something as woolly as progress on an estimated multi-person task is just noise. "There *is* a chance you might be about half done, but even that's optimistic," I said.

Open ##1261258
@cdonat@hostsharing.coop 2026-03-24 17:49

@kevlin I disagree, that it's an art, that these developers fail in. It's the essence of their craft: communication. Code is communication, nothing more, nothing less. If you fail at communication, you fail at programming.

Open ##1261265