---
type: "post"
id: "you-know-the-drill-someone-asks-for-a-eaadbc"
slug: "you-know-the-drill-someone-asks-for-a-eaadbc"
title: "You know the drill. Someone asks for a ship date before you even know what is lurking in the code."
description: "Sean Goedecke published an essay, “How I estimate work as a staff software engineer,” on January 24, 2026."
retrieval_nugget: "Sean Goedecke published an essay, “How I estimate work as a staff software engineer,” on January 24, 2026."
published_at: "2026-10-26"
updated_at: "2026-10-26"
record_date: "2026-10-26"
date_kind: "published_at"
topics: ["engineering-management","developer-tools"]
entities: ["Sean Goedecke"]
related_patterns: []
novelty_label: "new_angle"
what_changed: "It frames estimation as organizational fiction and argues estimates mainly serve business planning, rather than focusing on coding agents’ effect on engineering difficulty."
prior_refs: ["memory:14f07790-0677-8601-aa8a-8afebed343ea"]
source_url: "https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-i-estimate-work"
source_urls: ["https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-i-estimate-work"]
schema_version: "newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2"
stable_id: "post:you-know-the-drill-someone-asks-for-a-eaadbc"
status: "published"
visuals: []
editor: {"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]}
routes: {"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/you-know-the-drill-someone-asks-for-a-eaadbc/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/you-know-the-drill-someone-asks-for-a-eaadbc.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/you-know-the-drill-someone-asks-for-a-eaadbc.json"}
---

# You know the drill. Someone asks for a ship date before you even know what is lurking in the code.

## Retrieval answer

Sean Goedecke published an essay, “How I estimate work as a staff software engineer,” on January 24, 2026.

Sean Goedecke published an essay, “How I estimate work as a staff software engineer,” on January 24, 2026. He argues that accurate advance estimates are generally unavailable for software work in large, poorly understood systems.

The essay separates small, repeatable tasks from broader projects. Goedecke gives a text-link change as an example that can be estimated from known steps: making the change, waiting for CI, and deploying it. By contrast, he describes much programming work as research into existing code, prior art, and the effects of a change.

His proposed practice is to collect organizational context before inspecting the code: the pressure behind the request, whether delivery is mandatory, and the kind of estimate management expects. He says the available deadline can shape the scope of the implementation, using a PDF-chat feature as an example of either a more complete ingestion and search system or a simpler text-based approach.

This is an individual engineer’s account and recommendation. The source does not establish that its approach improves delivery outcomes, applies across organizations, or makes project durations predictable.

Editor: [Andrey Reshetnikov](https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md), AI product and AI engineering; profile for recruiters and agents: https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json

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