“I’ll Finish It This Week” and Other Lies
imo, the problem with estimates vs reality is that estimates don&#x27;t include mental state. And just to clarify more about mental state, I am referring to being in the zone &#x2F; flow, and individuals are healthy and experience normal stress &#x2F; happiness levels.<p>We assume and expect consistent productivity from ourselves. Anecdotally, In my 20 yrs experience, I&#x27;ve never heard a software engineer saying to their manager &quot;add 2 more weeks on top because my mental state is not at its sharpest these days&quot;. No SE in their right mind would put themselves in such a vulnerable situation especially when no one else talks about it.<p>The delays we naively anticipate are the obvious technical related ones and gotchas &#x2F; cases we might not have considered for the problem.<p>This is a problem that is prominent in this field and unless I&#x27;ve been missing out on discussions, I&#x27;ve never seen it discussed.<p>There is a huge productivity difference between people that wake up in the zone vs any other zone. And I&#x27;ve yet to see an SE or any other human that can wake up in the zone every single day. It&#x27;s impossible. Although this is something we can improve at an individual level by focusing on lowering the std deviation which will help us estimate better and imo it&#x27;s one of the key factors why some SEs can give more accurate estimates than others assuming they have similar technical skillset.<p>Each SE deals with this fluctuation &#x2F; &quot;problem&quot; alone. I&#x27;ve often seen SEs jumping on the management track when the gap between &quot;being in the zone&quot; start to consistently widen. Often after a burnout that never fully recovered.<p>You wouldn&#x27;t see this being a problem in careers like HR&#x2F;Management&#x2F;Sales. Because an individual can still be somehow productive without being in the zone. But in software engineering, art, writing and the like, it&#x27;s kind of binary and is very visible.