Unless I catch myself breaking my own rule, I never second guess my developer's time estimate unless I think it's too short. I've been a developer (still am on

Unless I catch myself breaking my own rule, I never second guess my developer's time estimate unless I think it's too short. I've been a developer (still am one even though I manage people now too), and I've learned that I can't factor in all the things going through that person's mind. I have cleaned up too many messes because of negligence from people who do not understand how hard programming actually is. That's what most people, especially us developers at times, fail to recognize. That 5 minutes someone took to write an "easy" query against the CI and deployment server almost brought it down (true story, luckily I was monitoring it look at another issue). The ability to write code is taken for granted, because anyone can learn it. Some programming is easy, and some is extremely difficult and the real trick is knowing which. What scares me most about the code being written are the one off queries, etc. The ones that will "only be used once" or "only for low transaction instances". That's never true, someone will always have it laying around for that time when "we just really needed to make that update". An old boss of mine used to say "the perfect is the enemy of the good." This is true, there are a number of times you need get something up and running and worry about fixing it along the way. There are other times when that "good little app" got used in the wrong way and cost us hours of downtime because of a mistake due to rushing. Now the perfect solution doesn't look like it was such a bad choice after all. I can wait a day or so for a query that I could write in 5 minutes. In the long term, waiting a few extra hours isn't going to impact anything that much. I'd rather the developer be through then explain why no one went home that night because we had to clean up a mess.