> I gotta tell you that unless you're working with absolute bozos, nobody is looking at estimates and saying "oh duh, I am betting the farm this will complete on that date."
I gotta tell you, you've never worked with a business stakeholder, the government (see financial penalties for missing deadlines) or with an absolute deadline (ie Christmas) if you think that's true.
> Many commenters on this story believe the main purpose of estimation is to assert when something will be done
We know our estimates can never be guarantees, but that is irrelevant to stakeholders whose career advancement depends on project X being done in day Y. Guess who's opinion carries more weight in literally every profit making enterprise.
You and a few other responses hit on a related but distinct problem: an unmovable deadline.
In this case, the question is no longer "how long will X take" but "but what will it take for X to complete by Y." That can require aggressively cutting scope, reassigning resources, de-risking in every possible way. That's quite different than asking a developer/team "how long this will take" assuming constant resources and given scope.
There is a reason project management calls scope-cost-time the iron triangle. It's extremely to bind all three sides tightly unless the estimates are very good, and/or there is significant added buffer to the project (and that really means the cost side is what's stretching to give you extra certainty on the hard scope and time deadlines).
More commonly at most two of the three are tightly constrained, and another side is more free. One can optimize in some directions, but none of the sides are fully independent of each other. I think the best project outcomes I've seen on are ones where only one side is strongly fixed, and the team is in control of the other two aspects.
I gotta tell you, you've never worked with a business stakeholder, the government (see financial penalties for missing deadlines) or with an absolute deadline (ie Christmas) if you think that's true.
> Many commenters on this story believe the main purpose of estimation is to assert when something will be done
We know our estimates can never be guarantees, but that is irrelevant to stakeholders whose career advancement depends on project X being done in day Y. Guess who's opinion carries more weight in literally every profit making enterprise.