Overconfidence: Why You Suck At Making Development Time Estimates

[sl4shd0t]

Dan Milstein from Hut 8 Labs has written a lengthy post about why software developers often struggle to estimate the time required to implement their projects. Drawing on lessons from a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Dan Kahneman, he explains how overconfidence frequently leads to underestimations of a project's complexity. Unfortunately, the nature of overconfidence makes it tough to compensate. Quoting: "Specifically, in many, many situations, the following three things hold true: 1- 'Expert' predictions about some future event are so completely unreliable as to be basically meaningless 2- Nonetheless, the experts in question are extremely confident about the accuracy of their predictions. 3- And, best of all: absolutely nothing seems to be able to diminish the confidence that experts feel. The last one is truly remarkable: even if experts try to honestly face evidence of their own past failures, even if they deeply understand this flaw in human cognition they will still feel a deep sense of confidence in the accuracy of their predictions. As Kahneman explains it, after telling an amazing story about his own failing on this front: 'The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.'" http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png (http://twitter.com/home?status=Overconfidence%3A+Why+You+Suck+At+Maki ng+Development+Time+Estimates%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit. ly%2F14N6JT7) http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png (http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org% 2Fstory%2F13%2F04%2F23%2F2021201%2Foverconfidence-why-you-suck-at-making-development-time-estimates%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Df acebook) http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png (http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/04/23/2021201/overconfidence-why-you-suck-at-making-development-time-estimates?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=googleplus)

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