Living a Lie

Manuel Klimek has a very interesting post on The Perfect Engineering Lie.

It covers a subject which most developers have a love-hate relationship with, project estimates. I regularly find myself doing estimates according to 'perfect engineering days', one would think that I would know better from experience.

Of course these estimates backfire all the time, with little sympathy from senior management.

Lets face it, we (developers) all know that good developers work very hard, every second of the day. We even skip lunch to keep on working and we work longer hours than most people. We also share work spaces with 'valuable' people who do the exact opposite. These people will ruin your planning daily and you will hate it.

So how do you forecast the future taking into account external factors which management in most cases won't isolate you from?

Are we living a lie every day of our professional lives?