I haven't seen anyone talk about the elephant in the room - only part of the reason for giving estimates is practical. Most of it is political/psychological:

I haven't seen anyone talk about the elephant in the room - only part of the reason for giving estimates is practical. Most of it is political/psychological: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093789 The political solution is to give an estimate assuming nothing goes wrong, and then when things go wrong blame those things. This lets everybody from you up the chain look good while not changing anything.