http://www.devtopics.com/programmer-productivity-the-tenfinity-factor/

Sure enough, “unrealistic expectations” is near the top!

Also, the role of project managers causing projects to actually fail can’t be over estimated. If only I had a dollar for the number of times a project manager tries to make a software feature that they can say in one sentence equal as small a line on a gantt chart as possible. Most car accidents are not caused because someone crashed into the mountain, they are caused because they didn’t see the small rock,pot hole or oil slick etc on the road or didn’t understand its importance. Same with a lot of projects. Had one just recently where the customer was upgrading a software package/api they hadn’t touched in 5 years. I wanted to test it and put lots of time on the critical path because I said their would be lots of things no-one knew about, there always is with software/sdk’s. Well, the project managers said “the vendor said its similar, so lets give it a week”. And he was fine, as he had someone (the vendor) to blame if it didn’t. And his Gantt chart looked great. What he wasn’t thinking - can I guarantee that my customer will hit their goal on time and budget. Guess what - the project is delayed 3 months, and has been basically canceled because when they pushed it into production (after 1 week of someone playing with it), all these little issues kept causing the software to crash. I ask, is it the lies people tell themselves that stops them honestly looking at the past and thinking the issues will not repeat and hence don’t use experience to set the correct expectations, or is that the people the Project Managers report to don’t get it or want to hear it because it might mean failure (when in fact its actually the opposite that is true - not dealing with it early will lead to failure), or is that they don’t want to “sell that news” , or they just don’t have the experience to understand it ? Sometimes I wish the PM’s were ex-developers. In Oz and NZ where our customers are, we just don’t get that many ex-developer PM’s. We get ex accountant and sales guys as PM’s. (ie. 95% of them) (Oh, i love the ones that say “you don’t need to understand software or technology to manage a project” - but why is that building project managers (the ones the make big bridges etc) always seem to be ex-builders or civil engineers ?).

One one hand, I work in government so I probably have to deal with deliberate underachievers more than egomaniacs. But I’m here to say “that guy” is not nearly standard an office presence as you might think. I have never met and cannot even envision meeting “that guy.”