[bob33212]

My advice would be to live in the real world. We don't know how long it is going to take. Just like if you go to turn on your car and it doesn't start. Maybe it was a minor issue and the next time you turn the key it will start. Maybe there was a short circuit and the car is totaled. A passenger asking you when you are going to get moving is no help.

[sopooneo]

If your car won’t start, it will take more than a second, but less than a year to fix. That is a bad estimate, but better than no estimate for a space alien that doesn’t know what a car is.

PM’s are space aliens.

[bb88]

The only tool the space alien's PM has is a deadline. "Do X by this date or else." Because he has no hope for understanding the true problem domain before the project deadline -- just like a space alien can't be expected to learn english in 4 days.

A PM with a deep understanding of the software process, can ask insightful questions, identify and possibly mitigate many of the issues beforehand. So when it gets to the software lackeys, many of the resource/architectural issues may have been solved.

[dragonwriter]

> If your car won’t start, it will take more than a second, but less than a year to fix. That is a bad estimate

It's actually a better estimate than most software estimstes, because it isn't just an expected time but a range that results will usually fall within. It would be better if it included an explicit degree of confidence that th actual result would be in the range, and if it was centered around the average time it would take for events in the class.