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Even if you are estimating your own tasks and there aren't many unknowns, as a developer I don't normally check in with myself every hour and ponder how much I've achieved, so my idea of how much I can do in an hour is not going to be too accurate. Then multiply the error by 300. At least if a team has daily standups they'd be used to assessing their progress per day.

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(Nice name)

The thing is, though, for many business models being able to accurately estimate time and cost is critical, and so is executing vs. that estimate.

It's nice to be able to say "I have no idea how long this will take," but it's also a luxury not available to many (most?) developers.

I doubt the manager focused on the hours. It was a simple way to say the manager doubled the expected timeframes when estimating tasks. By assuming the team is productive 1/2 the time, the task should take 2x the initial estimate.

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