The Engineering Manager
The bane of every software engineer's life is dates. And I'm not talking about date types in programming languages, nor am I talking about programming with timezones. I'm talking about the biggest thing that we continually, despite our best intentions, shoot ourselves in the foot with: just when exactly is that project going to be done?
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Now, companies want estimates from us for entirely reasonable reasons: they want to understand how they are investing their expensive engineering resources over time, ensuring that they're making the best trade-offs between what to do and what not to do. It makes sense.
However, despite all of us being pretty good at writing software, which is a complex and highly skilled task, we're absolutely awful at estimating how long it will take. Shockingly so.
