I think it has a lot more to do with how far away from academia they are. I side job as an external examination for CS students, and the way they are taught to

I think it has a lot more to do with how far away from academia they are. I side job as an external examination for CS students, and the way they are taught to do estimates are some of the most useless ways imaginable. Have you ever actually seen something like a planning poker session in action amongst only juniors? I have, and while this is very anecdotal, it has always played out like this: the most confident programmer in the group grossly underestimated the task. Often this person has a valid reason to be confident, but because of this, their opinion also weighs much more heavily in the group, so that even if someone throws the 100 card, the task will still end up with a 2. The longer you work in the real world, the more you realise that estimates aren’t a showcase of you. They are timeline project managers need to implement projects, and if you fail to give a realistic estimate then you fuck with that timeline which is often the worst thing you can possibly do as a software developer. Even if you “know” how to implement a really simple task, you simply need to make sure there is room for a days worth of searching for something really stupid, and you’re never going to be asked to estimate something really simple. Not as a junior, not as an experienced developer and not as a senior. I do understand why students are taught to estimate wrongly though. Their projects aren’t very long. But I personally think we are doing them a huge disfavour by making them estimate in hours. Because why wouldn’t they expect that to be the norm if that’s what they’ve learned to do?