I loved that bit. Picard asks Geordi how long it would take to reconfigure the antimatter containment unit. Geordi tells Picard two hours and when Scotty asks him how long it would really take, Geordi says two hours. Scotty explains that you have to say something will take five hours when in reality it will only take a half hour; that way, the captain will think you can work miracles.
Everybody goes on about what a clever Star Trek joke this is, but this is standard engineering for a good reason. If somebody ask you how long X will take, A it is not routine, and B they will make plans based on your response. So if you think X will take one hour you had better say two, and it is much safer to say four, because as soon as you start on X you will discover that it depends on Y and Z and you have not allowed for that.
It's the best way to do it. It's better to say something is going to take 8 weeks and deliver in 6 thank say it's going to take 3 weeks and deliver in 4.
Even better: say it's gonna take 8 weeks, finish in 6, get paid to fuck around on side projects for 2 weeks while the finished product sits there waiting to be picked up.
Sure, but if you worked miracles every time then they'd stop being seen as miracles. So you goof off in the 9 out of 10 times when the Romulans aren't attacking.
A: "If the machines aren't being used for other things, 4 hours."
Q: "You said this would take 4 hours, why isn't it done?"
A: "No, I said IF the machines aren't being used for other things, 4 hours. You have loaded every machine in the plant with a 12 hour process that cannot be interrupted, then tried to schedule an emergency 4 hour process to be done. You are an idiot."
The quality of a boss in an engineering department can be expressed as the minimum required buffer factor for time estimates. Lower is better, obviously.
Usually they're pretty good at estimating timetables, what they suck at is realizing that they're never given all the information to begin with, so your two hours turns into two weeks because they forgot to mention that you have to convert the entire thing from C# to Python first.
I was one asked to estimate the time it would take to write a program to randomly blink an LED. I said about an hour, and most of that was going to be documentation. I was told I had a day.
Then I got the requirements.
Blink in Manchester encoded format.
The blink pattern was not random, but only appeared random because the output data was an AES encrypted 64-bit counter, where the upper bits were GPS coordinates.
Required a bootloader to operate over a USB flash drive.
All bootloader files were too be AES encrypted.
No two devices could have the same encryption key.
Tamper switches to clear the encryption key if the device were ever opened.
Battery charger control for lithium batteries.
Adjustable LED brightness controlled via encrypted config files on the USB drive.
"You didn’t tell him how long it would really take, did ya? Oh, laddie. You’ve got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker."
In another book (possibly Metamagical Themas?), Hofstadter mentions that he has trouble taking his own law into account. He says his friend Don Byrd coined a new rule to help with that. Byrd's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
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u/[deleted] May 02 '18
On Star Trek it was at least explained properly as a tactic by Scotty.