Listen to Scotty
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as a joking reference in threads on estimation, technical debt and managing expectations.
What it is
A one-minute clip of Scotty from Star Trek giving advice to engineers about managing expectations in estimates. It is a comedic bit of workplace wisdom.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2018 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Cites Jach · 2018-07 · on “Ask HN: As a CTO, what is your most frustrating problem with technical debt?”
How are you measuring these things? 1. It's one of my dreams to work at a place using prediction markets for internal estimates. Anything else feels worthless and engineers are incentivized into the "quadruple what you're currently thinking" estimate so they more often meet deadlines -- or try to "under-promise, over-deliver" except management rightly catch on to that one immediately. (As an engineer I still want to be a La Forge and work with other La Forges, even if Scotty[0] sometimes has a point; modeling managers as demanding children has some gaping model gaps.) 2. What I've seen is that many delighters aren't that hard, but they're often treated as "polish" that goes into the p3/p4 pr