Show of hands for people who feel they can effectively estimate their work and consistently give accurate due dates on short tasks and longer projects?

I'm in postgrad research so I make an estimate and then work my ass off to meet those 😂

Basically the estimates are always off by plenty.

P.S. done enough projman to know these estimates should come from heuristics on similar projects. research has a problem there: often there is no similar project available.

I did per ticket estimates and I had like 99% accuracy. then you could string together ticket after ticket and get a timeline I guess

then management asked me to do estimates for other people but didn't mention it was for other people and I got that all wrong. I changed the estimates to be longer and I don't know what happened to that

the trick to estimates is give yourself far more time than necessary. then most of your tasks will be completed in 1/3rd the time, and anytime you run into something that's crazy bad you can eat into that padding time, also meetings

when I began a sys admin guy was doing my estimates and gave me 2 weeks for tasks that took 3 days for me... and management chewed him out which I thought was fucking dumb. so I guess if they're gonna do that don't tell them you did it faster

the other trick is to know the codebase first. I refused to estimate things I hadn't seen yet. I just can't know cuz I haven't looked at what's there

I usually figure out how long I will take and then double that. Learned this from a guy I worked with years ago. So even if the idiot manager decides to trim time off. I can still reasonably finish the work.

Am I effective. No clue.

We give mostly bullshit estimates to ease stakeholder anxiety because the business has the collective attention span of a 12 year old iPad kid

For small/medium sized things, I *can* accurately estimate how long something will take if I give a shit. My salary does not buy me giving a shit.

We have to estimate every task, every story, and every epic. When a task slips everyone gets chewed out and we have to replan everything. If we ask for padding to account for unexpected issues, they chew us out.

So now i just do my work and ignore time lines while my manager yells at everyone

Personally I think estimation is bull shit.

You can either be agile and not know when something will be done, or you can be rigid and know when it won't be done.

I give spot on perfect estimates 100% of the time, but the ticket descriptions are shoddy so there's always more work than expected.

Ok maybe not, but im seriours about the ticket descriptions. It's not always reasonable to estimates just using 2 lines of text like "migrate A to B" or "Add support for X". But hey, project managers know this and estimates are just that. That's why there is extra time added at every step of planning

Estimates are just there for management to jerk off at charts.

@Demolishun Had an old client tell me once that you should always double your estimate to take account of unforeseen issues, or triple it if you're still new to the game to also take account of your fledgling abilities.

It was one of my first jobs and took three times as long as I thought it would.