[newfoundglory]

Some devs seem to have actual phobias of estimates. My team was asked if we can deliver features x or x+ some time next year. (IMO as the dev who knows both the code and x best, we can deliver x in 2018 easily and x+ maybe). In our discussions about it, one guy would only say you can't predict the future, and another guy argued we should say either of them would take two years so that we could have time to rebuild the app from scratch while we delivered them. It's a web app.

[christopherslee]

tl;dr - we engineers are bad at estimation because we're too optimistic, and then we don't want to be accountable to the estimate given based on limited information.

i think we have phobias for estimates because of management repercussions that only happen when you miss an estimated delivery date, or for organizations that put external dates based on a best-case aggressive engineering estimate. then when the engineering team misses the date, there's a retro (when retros should happen for both good and bad sprints.)

i've never been clear why more organizations don't soft launch features or products, and then pick a marketing/external announcement date.

[newfoundglory]

I am an engineer. That isn't what I was trying to say. My interpretation of these conversations would be more like "we think managers are morons".