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One way to get the point across is by stopping to pretend estimates are precise.

Instead of giving a single fixed estimate, give one with error bars. "3 months, plus minus 4 weeks". Most engineers know their estimates have error bars, but have somehow been bludgeoned into forgetting to mention them.

It's also helpful from the management side - the size of the error bars makes it immediately clear how confident folks are in the estimate. It allows reasoning about risk. It allows things like "OK, currently we have 30% error bars either way - what are the biggest contributors to that? Can we knock one or two of those out when we spend a few days investigating?"

It's beyond me why we, as a supposed engineering profession, are unable to talk about risk, probabilities, and confidence intervals. And that isn't just on managers.

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smegger001 6 days ago | parent [-]

>It's beyond me why we, as a supposed engineering profession, are unable to talk about risk, probabilities, and confidence intervals. And that isn't just on managers.

Because management quits listening after hearing "3 months," and bad management heard "3 months minus three weeks" and goes "okay 2 months it is".

	▲	groby_b 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Outside of cartoons and a couple of rather bad environments, that's just plain made up nonsense. Management in most places is rather interested in getting planning right, not making up numbers and then failing at achieving them. They often lack the training to get it right (both because we have non-engineers as managers, and because we give shit management training to the engineers that become managers), but "management quits listening" is just an excuse. I'm in this thing for ~4 decades now, at a good number of companies of all sizes (3-200,000) and I've seen the "not listening and insisting on made up numbers" exactly once. I see however a lot of engineers refuse to even attempt to make reasonable estimates.