[000ooo000]

>Avoiding responsibility for estimates is another way of saying, “I’m not ready to be relied upon for building critical pieces of infrastructure.”

There's potential for significant nuance in such a scenario and to reduce it to this silly quote hurts the piece, IMO.

[yobbo]

But also, people are responsible for estimates from the first day of their career. It's the scope that changes.

[dbc_dvon]

The quote sucks and I completely disagree with the author.

It puts the whole responsibility on the engineer to predict how long a thing will take. There are much better approaches though. We can focus on allowing the team to create lots of small tickets (can be done in a few hours or 1-2 days), massively improving our prediction estimates. The author seems to suggest we should be able to predict the future no matter the task or team communication/organization.

[daliusd]

I think you have misread quote here. Emphasis is on taking responsibility here IMHO. Your proposal to “divide and conquer” is still estimation process.