Jon Pretty

Theory: Engineers are never “done” getting better at time estimation. As soon as you get “better”, you’re asked to estimate bigger, more complex, more ambiguous projects, and you have to level up all over again.

I have three measure: 1/ done before tomorrow ; 2/ looks like something I already did in less than a week, so something like that ; 3/ not the least idea, do you want that we play dices together to fill your columns?

for compsci, a professor told us that it was absurd to ask estimates to dev: our work is by essence to automate things. Either the thing is already automated, and you don't need an estimate anymore. Or it's a new thing to automate, and you don't know yet how it can be done :)

Software development is one of the only professions where we are asked to accurately state how long it will take us to do something that has never been done before in the history of the universe.

...which is itself something that's almost never been done accurately in the history of the universe!