On the other hand, you really do need some kind of estimate. You'd never hire an hourly contractor to remake your roof if he refused to give any kind of estimate, why wouldn't the same apply to software engineering?
That being said, accurate estimates are usually not needed, but the order of magnitude is. Knowing if the change is days, weeks or years of work is important - and while we're bad at estimates, we're rarely "I estimated 2 weeks but it took 6 months"-bad.
Estimate how long it will take to develop room temperature superconductors.
To assist you, let me paint a picture to put you in the right frame of mind:
You have never worked with superconductors of any kind and you’re not even a physicist. You’re one of those “scientist types” that are indistinguishable in the eyes of account managers.
You’re in a thirty minute Teams meeting with a disinterested project mismanager that wants not just a finish date (on a specific date), but the milestone dates on the way there.
You haven’t even met the team you’ll be working with. You haven’t yet spoken with the customer. Your “requirements” (lol) is literally just three words.
Your “obstinance” at refusing to be professional and “do your job” is being thrown in your face by the PM and is being recorded for your next review meeting.
Replace “room temperature superconductors” with any one of dozens of IT technologies or tasks and you have a nearly verbatim replay of my career and my challenges with estimation.
Here’s the thing: if you’re doing something for the first time, you can’t estimate it. If you’re doing it a second time, you can’t estimate it either because it’ll benefit from reuse in a way not experienced the first time. If you’re doing things three or more times in IT, you had better automate the process… another unpredictable first-time activity.
You’re either a meat robot doing repetitive work best done by scripts or LLMs - or by definition you are doing things for the first time and can’t estimate accurately.
I don’t do the equivalent of putting down roof tiles in my work.
That being said, accurate estimates are usually not needed, but the order of magnitude is. Knowing if the change is days, weeks or years of work is important - and while we're bad at estimates, we're rarely "I estimated 2 weeks but it took 6 months"-bad.