[mettamage]

> but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates

There are enough senior software engineers in this world that will have a crazy hard time making a good estimate. There was this HN comment once that mentioned that learning how to estimate work is it's entire own discipline.

It can be done and trained, according to that comment, but the comment also seemed to imply that it seems very unusual to do so.

I can't find the comment unfortunately, I read it years ago here.