I agree with your point, but I think the industry suffers from its own incapability to communicate, I had a manager that would ask stuff on tight deadlines, and

I agree with your point, but I think the industry suffers from its own incapability to communicate, I had a manager that would ask stuff on tight deadlines, and I would always complain, make sure they understood that it was not how things were to be done, but did it, once, twice, third time I refused and people got the task instead of me, silently. What you say about >> "The _actual_ problem, though, is more insidious. It's that the engineer then frequently accomplishes the task in the shorter time frame, and looks like a miracle worker. This reinforces the manager's intuition that the engineer is padding the time estimates and trains them to continue to behave the same way in the future. What _isn't_ apparent is what was sacrificed in order to accomplish that time schedule." The majority of things in life are not apparent, and that's what needs to be communicated correctly, the manager doesn't have a telepathy skill or a crystal ball, developers need to learn to talk