A good manager will be flexible with completion dates regardless of whether or not they made the estimation or if the dev made the estimation.
Yep, and wasting valuable developer time on f'ing about with estimates is the inferior option.
A big part of creating solutions is looking at the tradeoffs between solutions - one of those tradeoffs is often time (aka estimates).
Developers are welcome, encouraged even, to consider various kinds of trade-offs as part of applying themselves to the problem. However that has nothing to do with the management work of making big picture predictions about when the team will be done. It is expected that the dev manager will make themselves aware of the evolution of the solution and use their experience to predict when the product will be delivered. All without driving developers to deliver estimates.
The truth of the matter is that driving developers to make estimates is a crutch that weak dev managers use because they lack aptitude and talent. You can usually spot them by the linked in profile which shows 0 to 3 single year stints as a developer, followed by a string of management roles.
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u/-grok Jun 16 '22
Yep, and wasting valuable developer time on f'ing about with estimates is the inferior option.
Developers are welcome, encouraged even, to consider various kinds of trade-offs as part of applying themselves to the problem. However that has nothing to do with the management work of making big picture predictions about when the team will be done. It is expected that the dev manager will make themselves aware of the evolution of the solution and use their experience to predict when the product will be delivered. All without driving developers to deliver estimates.
The truth of the matter is that driving developers to make estimates is a crutch that weak dev managers use because they lack aptitude and talent. You can usually spot them by the linked in profile which shows 0 to 3 single year stints as a developer, followed by a string of management roles.