I'm consistently wrong about how long tasks take. How did you actually get better at estimating?
Six months in and my estimates are a running joke to myself. I say "half a day" and it's two days because of some edge case, or a flaky test, or a review round I forgot to count.
The senior folks on my team somehow give a number and mostly hit it. Is that just pattern-matching from years of scars, or is there an actual method? Do you pad by 2x? Break tasks smaller? I'd love to stop dreading the "so when will this be done" question in standup.
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AnonymousAnon Track your estimates vs actuals for a couple of weeks — most people are shocked to find they're off by a fairly consistent multiple, and just multiplying by that fudge factor fixes half the problem overnight. The other half: break anything bigger than a day into sub-tasks. The fog is exactly where the underestimation hides.
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AnonymousAnon It's mostly scars, but there's a trick: estimate the coding, then explicitly add the stuff that isn't coding — tests, review rounds, the PR sitting for a day, the thing you'll discover once you open the file. That invisible tail is where your "half a day" dies. I switched to ranges ("1–3 days") instead of a point, which is both more honest and less stressful. Nobody senior nails it either, they just pad better.