[JohnFen]

> Your approach works if everyone knows ahead-of-time the exact amount of effort that something will take.

No, it really doesn't require that. But we're getting into the topic of project planning, which is a larger subject than we can tackle in the comments here. Fortunately, this is a topic discussed in great detail elsewhere.

> But it’s also possible that the first engineer was just better, and the second had terrible system design skills and constant spaghetti code that made a simple project seem complex.

Right, I was intending to cover that with my "acceptable quality" conditional.

[l33t233372]

Where is project planning discussed well, in your opinion?

[JohnFen]

I have no single source. I only meant that this is a topic that is widely covered, and collectively with greater depth than is appropriate in this thread. Read widely on this topic, and don't focus just on one perspective. That way, needed nuance can be retained.