The Formula 1 calendar runs from February to early December each year and at the end of February/early March, there are 3 days of pre-season testing for each of the 10 teams on the grid. Finally, the fans (and other teams) get to see what the teams have been working on over the winter break. Sometimes, the cars are wildly different from the previous season due to some changes in the racing regulations from the FIA and other times, the teams just get to improve on the previous year’s car.
Since I started following F1 avidly in 2019, I’ve come to familiarise myself with the term “sandbagging” in pre-season testing. The term describes a situation where a team deliberately hides or masks the performance of their cars in order to maintain an edge over their rivals in the first few races of the season. The idea being that, they can go into the first race of the season with an advantage and garner some valuable points before their rivals catch on to their tricks.
Questions abound around the ethics of the practice but I’m convinced that the top teams engage in this behaviour to some extent.
I am then reminded of the estimation calls I partake in as a software engineer with the expectation that engineers determine how much time and effort a task, feature or bug fix would require.
About 3 years into my engineering career, I learned the habit of under-promising and over delivering. This is a scenario where you consciously decide to give a inflated estimate of how much time and effort it takes to get a task done only to deliver the solution ahead of time. To me, that’s equivalent to “sandbagging” in F1.
The point of this post is, is that ethical? Should it be encouraged or discouraged in software engineering?