Back of the envelope estimation hacks
I've found people hate giving numbers to things when estimating how a system would work, or what it would need.  Ballparking can really help though.<p>I've found success asking questions such as "Roughly how much will updating my abstract cost?  I won't hold you to the number, but are we talking closer to $200 or $800?".  I make sure the numbers are quite far apart, and use it to figure high/low ends of required performance, deciding if something that's not currently the bottleneck will become a bottleneck, etc.<p>Also, converting between hourly and salaried, you can roughly use 40 hrs/week * 50 weeks/year = 2,000 hours/year.