"My suspicion is that this interplay between engineering manager and engineer is nothing but a game. Either to the manager, or to the company. Either it is a sh

"My suspicion is that this interplay between engineering manager and engineer is nothing but a game. Either to the manager, or to the company. Either it is a show of power by the manager, or it is a strategy for increasing the company's profits. In other words, if a boss is not totally clueless (which some seem to be), he knows an engineer can't complete a job in three days that will take a month. But, he must appear to be playing the company's game. The company wants the engineer working unpaid overtime, as much unpaid over time as the engineer can possibly endure." At my last job, this was definitely the case. I'd come in with a realistic estimate, and everyone would be shocked. This is too much time, they'd say. How can we cut this down? There would be a discussion. We'd play a little game where we'd pretend we could cut corners over here and find efficiencies over there, and hey presto, we'd get it done in half the time. Now everyone is happy. Except nothing has changed. The job ends up taking as long, or longer, than the original estimate, but everyone has to work overtime to reach the deadline. I suspect the same thing as the author; everyone knew we weren't actually cutting the time down. We were just promising to get it done faster for free.