Honestly, I've seen highly technical managers make this mistake worse than the non-technical ones. Non-technical people usually ask sincere questions before sho

Honestly, I've seen highly technical managers make this mistake worse than the non-technical ones. Non-technical people usually ask sincere questions before shoving an unrealistic deadline in your face. Technical managers may have already told someone in the C-suite "ohh yeah, that's easy" before talking to the guy who has to do the work. I've had ex-programmer managers say "I just want you to add this graph to the app. I could do it in 20 lines of python." In reality, the request is more like "Add in this plot which is the result of a long running calculation. The calculation has to run in a background thread so the app is still responsive, even though the whole program has been architected with a single-threaded design. It needs some mechanism in the UI to indicate it is making progress. We'll also want a way to cancel the task. Half the datasets are using a different sign convention, so you'll need to automatically handle that. Actually, the data is polluted with garbage, you'll need to spend an unknown amount of time debugging a legacy system to figure out where the bad inputs are coming from in order to understand what can be done to filter that out...so we can have this plot by end of day, right?" Apologies for ranting about my "internal software" days.