I'm going to provide a contrarian opinion here: Managers do this because engineers can rarely be trusted to estimate timelines properly, or at least communicat

I'm going to provide a contrarian opinion here: Managers do this because engineers can rarely be trusted to estimate timelines properly, or at least communicate them. Or it's a rare engineer who does this well. Either they don't even think about timelines, or they grossly underestimate the amount of time that something will take, find dependencies that add a week of unexplained time to fix, or handwave off the parts with least clarity, assuming it will be straightforward. And then you find out it actually takes double the time to do it properly, or the original timeline produced an output that was fully of bugs in the edge cases. So, what happens, managers start to not trust when engineers give estimates, make up their own more "believable" estimates, and also start to expect that if they compress the timeline, it won't be a major issue because the engineering team is putzing around with non-essential work anyway. So, if you want managers to respect and work with realistic timelines, you'd better give them a solid track record of delivering what you said you would in the past. There's blame to go around.