Want to hire the most experienced programmer out of a group of candidates? Ask them to estimate a programming task, then pick the one that gives the longest estimate.

I'd say hire the one that gives you the best justification for their estimate. It's important for people to understand what is and is not involved in an estimate as well as why they think something is hard.

Once you communicate that, you can uncover a lot of potential problems and misunderstandings. For instance just the other day my co-worker was asked to estimate a task that seemed to our boss to be pretty small. He estimated it as being 2-8 days, it wasn't until they actually started talking about _why_, that they both agreed on the requirements. The resulting task will probably take 1-3 hours.

So sure, as a developer learns more they may estimate tasks as being longer, but communicating your assumptions is more important than throwing out huge estimates to cover your ass ;)

hey, I'd like to play around with them if you have some to spare! 18CsFA1WJh4zCMTPWoNcwmzfod9vrdZkNS

I only have 0.07 left, but you can have them (minus the 0.01 transaction fee). :)

Can you point out the diff between that and the stock market? Isn't a stock in the stock market not really backed by anything other than people's speculation?

Stock in a company is equity. You own a slice of the company. If the company pays dividends, you are entitled to a portion of its future earnings.

Yes, that's essentially correct. And that's why stocks can plunge and lose practically all (or all) their value relatively quickly, as happened to General Motors and many banking stocks in 2008, for example.

Edit: To clarify, even when a company pays dividends which holding the stock entitles you to you are speculating the company will continue to pay, or be able to pay, which is why you continue to hold the stock. This is why stocks are risky -- they have no guaranteed value (or backing) and can crash theoretically at anytime.

Not at all. A stock represents a share of a company's earnings, which has real fundamental value. There are bubbles and random swings, but at the end of the day, a stock is worth something like the present value of future dividends. (Even for a non-dividend-paying stock - the idea being that eventually the company will mature and start paying a dividend.)

Similarly to jerf, I think if you point this out to someone "in the know", and dig deep enough, they won't get mad, but it'll turn out that it's "really complicated" and "you wouldn't understand unless you were heavily involved". It happened at least once, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was common.

A stock should be backed by all the assets of a company, shouldn't it?

A stock is backed by companies' performance, I think.