[MattGaiser]

> In every other discipline, you would ask engineers for an estimate. It's insanity to do otherwise.

I studied engineering in university and profs had plenty of stories about bosses sending business analysts to look at similar projects, generating a time estimate from those projects, and then send that estimate to the engineers as their deadline for completing the project.

It being insane doesn't stop people.

[Scarblac]

That's a pet peeve of mine. A perfect estimate is one without bias. It can't be without variance because there is always uncertainty involved in what needs to be done exactly.

So if you take an estimate and turn it into a deadline, in the perfect case, the deadlines can only be made 50% of the time.

Of course, in practice there is bias, there are things you forgot to include in the estimate.