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And that's the way it should be.

But keep in mind that if a developer is in a sprint, he might start adding tickets to the epic because of technical/organizational issues. Suddenly the epic might look 3x more work than was originally planned. Note this is not theoretical, as it's happened 3 times to our team already this year.

But meanwhile in the example I gave, the developer gets held accountable still for not making the correct estimate. Management just passes it up the chain rather than trying to increase the confidence around the estimate.