[ccpcx]

Yeah, most people don't go around making unreasonable demands on purpose. I have worked myself up in the past into believing that I must be lazier than everyone else, or that all my managers have been rabid workaholics who think everyone else is lazy, or maybe I don't belong in this job because their requests seem so daunting, but they were given so casually, so maybe it's not the requests that are unreasonable but my productivity...

You're supposed to work with them to balance the needs and set the expectations on both sides. Management is probably so used to this exchange that it may never occur to them to actually inform you that you're expected to push back if needed. They think that when you acquiesce to the request, it means you actually think that it works just fine, not that you think it's not worth arguing or don't know how to. And techies IME, especially younger/less experienced ones, tend toward the dangerous assumption that their managers know how to do their subordinates' jobs[1] and that their dictates are sound. Of course, it doesn't need to be an argument, as such -- as with many things the attitude should be not "my needs versus your demands" but "us together versus the problem of sizing resources for this project". I think it's generally not necessary to get terribly aggro about it, but approaching it as a sort of consultation helps a lot.

(1) They hired you to do your job and your manager is being paid to do a different job, right? And your manager's job description is not "be better than you at your job and also do some paperwork and performance evaluations". Best case scenario, your manager used to do your job but it's been a while. Quite possibly they have never done your job at all. Your manager's job is not a superset of your job, and you know things they don't about your job. This may sound exceedingly obvious but it took me quite a while to fully integrate this concept.