I tend to have a darker, more cynical view. Asking for an estimate is often a power play or "microaggression". It's more often about showing dominance than any

I tend to have a darker, more cynical view. Asking for an estimate is often a power play or "microaggression". It's more often about showing dominance than any legitimate business need to know this unknowable quantity. It plays a programmer's present self against her future self. Her future self wants an accurate or even pessimistic estimate to be made, so there are no unpleasant surprises to management and painful conversations resulting from inflated expectations. But her present self wants the guy standing at her desk to go away so she can get back to work. An unreasonably optimistic estimate gives the powerful, annoying people what they want so they go away. A realistic estimate is going to lead to obnoxious follow-on questions. "Why's it going to take so long?" "I don't know, but experience leads me to think..." "But you see no specific reason why this can't be done in 2 weeks?" "Well, no, because there are unknown unknowns..." "Great! Two weeks!" This degenerates for two reasons. First, managers tend to believe that, even if overly optimistic estimates are more inaccurate, the work is done more quickly with unreasonable estimates (which become "milestones", then "deadlines"). So they take this as an incentive to be more irritating because it "makes people work faster". Second, it leads to poor planning and brittle schedules and much more undesirable variance. Obviously, the good software managers don't play these games, but they're probably 1 in 10. Because there is so much money in software, and because programmers refuse to organize and allow themselves to be underpaid, that creates lots of room for mismanagement. Developers are also to blame for some of this; because they've been in mismanaged environments for years, many of them have developed a distrust of management that has led them to miscommunicate and (inappropriately) simplify, hence the "estimates" that evolve into deadlines. Overconfidence and miscommunication are, for sure, substantial components.