[mschuster91]

> and it bothers me how much they seem to clearly exaggerate the difficulty of things.

Scotty Engineering principle at work. I'm no stranger to that, it's often enough the only strategy keeping higher management from completely swamping you with work.

[ori_prior]

It's not that it usually is the Scotty Engineering principle. It is more often a hedge against unforeseen complications, because if you give a realistic estimate that would be true for 90% of the tickets, the 10% will come to bite you. So to not get chewed up for providing realistic 90%-true estimates, you give 99.9%-true estimates that are far higher, but with just a .1% chance of being screwed instead of a 10% chance. Which is, at 10 tickets per day, getting chewed up daily vs. once every two weeks or so.