Cost Estimation

one of the big things you’re going to have to get good at on the journey up the software development ladder is answering the questions of “how much will it cost” and “how long will it take” and honestly I see a lot of junior developers fall into the trap that accurately answering these questions is literally impossible

if you can back-of-the-envelope this stuff and get it even remotely in the right ballpark that is fine, just give them something

look, kid, I KNOW that all software development is custom and all custom work is unpredictable, that’s like the first thing we all learn, just give the blazers-and-golden-retrievers a dang t-shirt size for that login screen and we’ll figure it out as we go

the accuracy of the cost estimate needs to be, like, within an order of magnitude, if you can even get the number of zeroes right you’re golden, just find a little bit of real data and extrapolate a bit