How are software engineers objectively measured when problems span such large difficulty ranges and there are multiple ways to implement solutions?

Question

Always been curious how “workload” is assigned and estimated for software engineers.

In: 92

Answer 1

For more standard software jobs you can break down tasks, and estimate how long each one should take. This is usually pretty basic since a lot of the tasks you are going to be doing have likely been done before in some way, so we actually know how long they should take. Your performance would then be based on how slow/fast you were getting these done compared to what was estimated.

However for me, I work in experimental tech. We have no idea how long anything will take, or if it’s even possible which pretty much puts me at the mercy of my supervisor judging if I did a good job or not. A lot of times I’ll spend an entire day pouring through and researching documentation trying to see if what we’re attempting to do will even work only to commit a few lines of code at the end of the day and worry that it looks like I got nothing done.