Humans are lazy. Most take the path of least resistance. You're incentivized to hit a goal - if you can hit that goal with minimal effort by obfuscating or exag

Humans are lazy. Most take the path of least resistance. You're incentivized to hit a goal - if you can hit that goal with minimal effort by obfuscating or exaggerating to naive management, why wouldn't you? You're just an IC, a worker bee, you probably don't have equity or any real ties to the company's overall success (which isn't an engineer's job to define in the first place).