When we did a postmortem on it, somewhat over 1000 hours is how high the total staff cost seemed to us, and that was a few months ago.
I think it’s totally plausible that in a few places I or someone else on the team used a lower number that they felt more confident in. In-general the structure of “over X” is something I usually use when I am not sure about X, but want to give a quick lower bound that allows me to move ahead with the argument, so it seems totally possible that in another context I would have said “multiple hundreds of hours” or “300+” hours or something like that, because that was enough to prove the point at hand.
Edit: Oh, I see the links now, didn’t see them when I first wrote the comment.
I kept wanting to just share what I’d learned. I ended up spending about ~320 hours (two months of work), over the span of six calendar months, to get to a place where I was personally confident of the basic dynamics (even though I expect I have some of the details wrong), and that Alice and Chloe felt comfortable with my publishing.
I think the key difference with that quote and my number is that it just includes Ben’s time, as opposed to total staff time. For example, it omits work done by anyone else on the team (which roughly doubles the total amount of time spent, spread across me, Robert and Ruby), as well as others who we’ve brought on board to help with the post (we worked with 2-3 external collaborators who ended up pairing with Ben for multiple weeks).
My guess is also Ben’s number is a bit low for his own time spent on it, though I think we are now getting into definitions of what counts as “working on it”. We don’t have detailed time tracking, so this is a bit hard to operationalize, but my guess is if you added up all the staff time of Lightcone staff and external collaborators, and removed the project of writing the Nonlinear post, you would indeed end up with somewhat more than a thousand hours of additional free time across those people.
Thanks. I didn’t mean my comment to come across as a “gotcha” question fwiw (not saying that you said it was a gotcha question, but I realized after I commented that it’d be a reasonable interpretation of my comment).
For what it’s worth, I find it extremely plausible that a post like this both took an inordinately large amount of time, and that people will systematically underestimate how much it took before they started doing more accurate time-tracking.
It does seem very sad that the voting on this post seems a bit broken (it also seemed broken on the original Nonlinear post). Like, do people think I am lying about the amount of hours it took? I would be happy to provide the data that I have, or have someone else who is more independent to the Lightcone team provide an estimate. It seems very weird to downvote an answer to a straightforward question like that.
Hmm, well Ben said “(for me) a 100-200 hour investigation” in the first post, then said he spent “~320 hours” in the second. Maybe people thought you should’ve addressed that discrepancy?️ Edit: the alternative―some don’t like your broader stance and are clicking disagree on everything. Speaking of which, I wonder if you updated based on Spencer’s points?
Edit: Oh, I see the links now, didn’t see them when I first wrote the comment.
Apologies, that was my fault. I wrote the comment and then I realized that I was demonstrating poor reasoning transparency, so then I hunted down the relevant links. My guess of chronology was that I had the hyperlinks added in after you started commenting, but before your reply was visible.
Ah, cool, I was really surprised when I saw the links on refresh, but they fit so naturally into the comment that I thought they clearly must have been there in the first place.
Is it just me or does the number keep going up with every retelling?
When we did a postmortem on it, somewhat over 1000 hours is how high the total staff cost seemed to us, and that was a few months ago.
I think it’s totally plausible that in a few places I or someone else on the team used a lower number that they felt more confident in. In-general the structure of “over X” is something I usually use when I am not sure about X, but want to give a quick lower bound that allows me to move ahead with the argument, so it seems totally possible that in another context I would have said “multiple hundreds of hours” or “300+” hours or something like that, because that was enough to prove the point at hand.
Edit: Oh, I see the links now, didn’t see them when I first wrote the comment.
I think the key difference with that quote and my number is that it just includes Ben’s time, as opposed to total staff time. For example, it omits work done by anyone else on the team (which roughly doubles the total amount of time spent, spread across me, Robert and Ruby), as well as others who we’ve brought on board to help with the post (we worked with 2-3 external collaborators who ended up pairing with Ben for multiple weeks).
My guess is also Ben’s number is a bit low for his own time spent on it, though I think we are now getting into definitions of what counts as “working on it”. We don’t have detailed time tracking, so this is a bit hard to operationalize, but my guess is if you added up all the staff time of Lightcone staff and external collaborators, and removed the project of writing the Nonlinear post, you would indeed end up with somewhat more than a thousand hours of additional free time across those people.
Thanks. I didn’t mean my comment to come across as a “gotcha” question fwiw (not saying that you said it was a gotcha question, but I realized after I commented that it’d be a reasonable interpretation of my comment).
For what it’s worth, I find it extremely plausible that a post like this both took an inordinately large amount of time, and that people will systematically underestimate how much it took before they started doing more accurate time-tracking.
It does seem very sad that the voting on this post seems a bit broken (it also seemed broken on the original Nonlinear post). Like, do people think I am lying about the amount of hours it took? I would be happy to provide the data that I have, or have someone else who is more independent to the Lightcone team provide an estimate. It seems very weird to downvote an answer to a straightforward question like that.
Hmm, well Ben said “(for me) a 100-200 hour investigation” in the first post, then said he spent “~320 hours” in the second. Maybe people thought you should’ve addressed that discrepancy?️ Edit: the alternative―some don’t like your broader stance and are clicking disagree on everything. Speaking of which, I wonder if you updated based on Spencer’s points?
Apologies, that was my fault. I wrote the comment and then I realized that I was demonstrating poor reasoning transparency, so then I hunted down the relevant links. My guess of chronology was that I had the hyperlinks added in after you started commenting, but before your reply was visible.
Sorry if that burned extra time on your end. :)
Ah, cool, I was really surprised when I saw the links on refresh, but they fit so naturally into the comment that I thought they clearly must have been there in the first place.
No worries, it cost me like 3 minutes.