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Who is doing the estimates of how long thing will take to deliver?


Any GOOD manager. Probably in collaboration with the team and possibly a PM


So there's the rub. When the "good" manager asks you, "how long do you think this task will take" and you say "40 hours" but then you do it in 1 hour - do you still think you have the rest of the week to load the dish washer, play with your kids etc?


A "good" manager can at least broadly know how long something will take, and not accept "40 hours" for a 1 hour project. A good manager may not be able to know that a 40 hour project will only take the employee 30 hours, but at that point, who cares? Is the employee sandbagging an extra 10 hours that problematic? Do we really need employees correctly estimating time to completion as perfectly as possible? Is an employee completing a task the company wants them too, ahead of time and on schedule, with a few extra hours to decompress or live their life really a disaster scenario?

What happens if the employee says "30 hours" and if it takes them 40. Do managers/organizations then move things back, or do they expect things done by the deadline given previously, even if it means putting in overtime to get it across the finish line?


re: 40 hours vs 1 hour - I used that example because the commenter further up the thread explicitly said:

> it is none of your business if they used 40 hours a week or 1 hour a week doing it


Evidence based scheduling includes downtime.




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