>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".

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.