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proc0today at 2:43 AM0 repliesview on HN

I have a solution but I don't think companies care about this level of meta-analysis on how people work together. They think they do but in reality they just care about optics, and the status quo culture has a huge weight on continuing in the same direction, largely dictated by industry "standards".

In essence, estimates are useless. There should only be deadlines and the confidence of engineers of achieving the deadline. To the extent there are estimates, it should be an external observation on the part of PMs and POs based not only on the past but also on knowledge of how each team member performs. This of course only works if engineers are ONLY focusing on technical tasks, not creating tickets or doing planning. The main point of failure in an abstract sense is making people estimate or analyze their own work, which comes with a bias. This bias needs to be eliminated and at the same time you give engineers the opportunity to optimize their workflows and maximize their output.

TLDR, engineers should only focus on strictly technical because it allows to optimize within the domain, meanwhile other roles (whoever PM, PO or other) should be creating tasks, and estimating. Of course this doesn't work because there are hard biases in the industry they are hard to break.