wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again

Assuming there is perfect information in the market. In reality there is heavy information asymmetry.

It also assumes free competition while we have every market dominated by a few players buying up everyone else, often with cartel like behavior.

Like many things they won’t bother for occasional personal use, but will come down with the hammer if it turns into a business.

Garbage in, garbage out. These logos represent the latter.

Well, often they know it´s hard to estimate, but the entire corporate system is built around having things done by a certain date, your time costs money and payments are usually linked to those dates. They don´t really have a choice but to make a planning based on the estimates you give and monitor the progress so they can give the proper level of panic to their bosses. Of course, software has always been a disaster with estimates and attempts to tame the chaos haven´t been that successful.

I usually make a ridiculously detailed list of all tasks. ¨Add button A on screen. Discuss details: 2 hours. Interface work: 0.5 hour. Code work: 2 hours. Database work: 2 hours. Testing: 2 hours. FAT: 2 hours. Changes after FAT: 1 hour. SAT: 2 hour. Test script: 1 hour. Update documentation: 2 hours. Add button B … ¨ Put it all in an excel sheet and summarize. Most PMs don´t even want to start arguing a list like that, and it seems to make a reasonably good estimate for me.

It’s an attempt to get a handle on things and trying to avoid situations such as:

“Oh, I was struck on that point for the last 3 months. I reinvented the wheel 2 times and now it works.”

“And now we’re 3 months behind schedule. Why didn’t you ask anybody?”

“Yeah, I didn’t want to bother anyone. But I did put in on the timesheets.”

“It says ‘working on project’.”

And that’s how regular project update meetings get scheduled, and a bunch of messages asking for updates.