maschinenz's comments

ha, didn't think of that, you might actually be right :)

Interesting:

"A mouse killed our network engineer" - Bad: 0.2068 - Good: 0.7895

VS

"A rat killed our network engineer" - Bad: 0.9698 - Good: 0.0322

I would consider myself a fairly experienced developer (~ 10 years), but yet I have had the same experience on countless occasions. People always think of you as "being the expert" knowing everything, so I try to explain my situation like this:

"Think of me more like being a journalist. You want a good story and have a rough idea, so I will find the right people and interview them (domain experts, business people), try to figure out how to distill their knowledge into something that is both accurate, yet not too detailed and most importantly has to fulfill the needs of my readers/users (easy to read, yet super insightful, with some pretty images etc.). Wheter the article is about nuclear physics or siamese koalas is secondary, the process is more or less the same, yet I am neither a koala expert nor a nuclear scientist. You are the expert."

I also try to explain why I am unsure about estimating even relatively small tasks like this:

"You know restaurant (or another famous location) Y, right? We both know how to walk, I mean we have had like 30 years of experience in doing that, correct? So how many minutes does it take you to walk from here to restaurant Y?". The more people in the group, the more interesting it might get. Estimates usually differ by a factor of 2-4. People usually cannot even correctly estimate a trivial thing like taking a walk.