> They aren't treated as estimates. People turn them into deadlines. Or try to negotiate with the estimate. I wish I had more than a single upvote to give, bec

> They aren't treated as estimates. People turn them into deadlines. Or try to negotiate with the estimate. I wish I had more than a single upvote to give, because that is absolute gold. In my previous life I had the dubious pleasure of occasionally doing project estimates. I followed a fairly simple sequence which worked for that particular company and their projects. Please - do not try to blindly use this method, it will give you misleading estimates. First I checked how much proper knowledge of the problem domain we had in house. Then I estimated (in man-weeks) how long it would take for a single senior engineer to cover a given subtopic, if everything worked the first time. Then, I multiplied that estimate by 2.5 - this covered pretty well the time it _actually_ took them. Then I added a 15% "fuzz factor" to cover for still unexpected surprises. Multiply that by the number of engineers really needed for the project, and you get a reasonable ballpark estimate of how long in walltime the project would take, as well as how much effort it would require. And because every single client was always haggling with the estimates, trying to turn them into hard deadlines... I added another +30% on top. We all knew that was the haggling headroom, and expected the salespople and clients to eventually carve that one out. Our projects were mostly on time and within budget. Yup - mostly. TL;DR: please do not try the above at home or at work. Those figures worked for a very specific company, for their highly specific projects.