[jrockway]

I think this is because people don't understand how engineers spend their time. The stuff displayed on the screen makes no sense. Sometimes things that sound simple take weeks ("iOS Safari and Chrome behave completely differently!") and things that sound hard take an hour ("yeah that's just a flag flip"). What are "unit tests" and "code reviews"?

Even with 12 years of professional programming experience, I am only beginning to have an idea of how long things are going to take in the context of a small team. If you've never programmed before, I don't know how you could possibly come up with an idea of how long something should take. So it reduces to the heuristic of "well they're at their desk, I'm sure they're doing something."