You could argue that these are some of the many forms of "starting late": * If you just don't know how long something is going to take, and you need a date, th

You could argue that these are some of the many forms of "starting late": * If you just don't know how long something is going to take, and you need a date, then you're late to doing the work to know how long it will take. * If you do know how long something is going to take, and it's longer than a externally imposed date, then you know exactly how late you are. This is partly just playing with semantics, but it's also a way of talking around different views of the problem, in this case emphasizing that if dates are a feature, reasonable estimates are themselves a project. If the estimate work hasn't been properly completed and understood before dates are given, obviously, the larger project is by definition already late because there's work that needed to be done before beginning and wasn't. And I think if you take this view, it's easier to see that it's a project or team management problem rather than an engineering productivity problem.