>But in this planning phase something really strange happens: It has become the standard practice to highly exaggerate the efforts required to perform a task, w

>But in this planning phase something really strange happens: It has become the standard practice to highly exaggerate the efforts required to perform a task, which we’ll call task bloating. Had this at my current job shortly after starting. Was given an assignment to write a wrapper library for a 3rd party API that only had 4 endpoints (one of which was auth). None of them were complicated, the most complex was one that returned multipart data where I had to parse out a few things. Something that could be done in an hour, easy. I still decided that I would give myself extra time in case something else popped up before I could get around to it, so I told them two days. Everyone else on my team said that was way too short and insisted that I have an entire two week sprint to do it.