This is a question i have often asked. Just over 20 years ago I was renting a flat in Edinburgh where just opposite a steel-framed office block was being built.

This is a question i have often asked. Just over 20 years ago I was renting a flat in Edinburgh where just opposite a steel-framed office block was being built. The construction really interested me - i saw several guys and a crane operator swinging up a huge horizontal i-bar and bolting it on to the vertical bars, with no obvious problems. Compare that with adding a new interface to something. And do you think these guys were asked how long the bolting would take? No, they were told how long they had to do it, by the engineer in charge of the site, and they did it. This is why all software project managers should be highly competent programmers and should do all task (a bad word, imho) estimation themselves. After all. they are hopefully more experienced!