Honestly, after doing this whole data science thing for a while now, I'm going to be blunt: I can estimate quite a lot of tasks with quite a lot of accuracy. in

Honestly, after doing this whole data science thing for a while now, I'm going to be blunt: I can estimate quite a lot of tasks with quite a lot of accuracy. including software and IT tasks. What I can't do is make bad management hear what they don't want to hear. Nor can I stop people from accepting an estimate because its closer to what they want to be true, because they've already made a promise that conflicts with the actual estimate, or because a certain process requires or necessitates inaccurate estimates. I think the whole "software is hard to estimate" myth stems from 2 fundamental causes: - not controlling for human biases or referencing actual real world data - processes that don't punish/ reward people who provide inaccurate/accurate estimates respectively.