Humans—engineers especially—significantly underestimate the cost of getting things done in groups of people. We focus on the obvious and measurable work that needs to be done—iterate on a design, write the code, test, iterate, deploy—and we put a huge discount on the work required to share that process with others. Engineers have a well-deserved reputation for regularly being off by a factor of three in their work estimates, and that is partly due to the fact that we are really shitty at estimating the non-linear chaotic work (and fun) that exists in keeping a group of humans pointed in the
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