Early in my career, I once worked with someone who estimated 40 hours for anything and everything, every single time. Need to change some text here? "Well, it

Early in my career, I once worked with someone who estimated 40 hours for anything and everything, every single time. Need to change some text here? "Well, it's a complex system and we'll have to think about translations and if the same text is used anywhere else, whether it will affect the layout, etc., etc. - 40 hours." Need to build a whole new system from scratch? "Well, we have experience in that and it's a small enough data set and we have tools to help us - 40 hours." If it was a trivial change, then they had most of the week free to do whatever. If it was a huge project, then they'd go back and say "We need to reduce scope. They said they wanted X, but that actually wouldn't be good for them because of Y. We shouldn't do that, and they'll be glad we didn't." Somehow, this one person always managed hit their estimates spot-on, every time. This was a model employee. Depending on the company and your management, and how well you can BS, you can simply walk into Mordor whenever you feel like it.