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Wow, thanks a lot! I agree that I handled the situation very badly. The articles you refer to are exactly the guidance I had needed to learn the lesson less harshly. Sometimes I got advice from senior folk about how to navigate a workplace, other times I played by the ear.

When I was working in an office environment, not from home, I often could ask around for advice, get a hint about approaches to different people. It was more of a challenge when remote only.

>your manager is wrong, but the way you handled it is very immature. There are "shit" managers everywhere, if you get one, suck it up and start planning your escape.

They don't even sound that shitty to me. Managers like everyone else in the world have to work within the constraints of the system in place. Like Scrum vs Kanban. Maybe the manager couldn't care less but their director is the biggest Scrum cheerleader ever. And maybe they're getting hounded for the estimate and just need a number. And maybe skipping the internship program looks bad for the manager. And so on.

Even if it's all the Manager's fault there's far worse sins in the world than dictating a methodology or asking for an estimate.

The manager went with Kanban, but expressed disappointment and looked "visibly annoyed". While the event does describes disagreement and sort of conflict between op and manager, I don't see anyone acting badly there.

Its only significance seem to be that this might be one of reason why manager did not liked op, which yes, can happen with some personalities. But, op does not provide any part of story that would show that.

>I'd just say some very high number (3-4 months) and if they weren't happy, I'd just reply "when we start working on it we'll do our best to pull it in".

Yeah. If it's something I have some familiarity with, I can usually throw out an upper bound. And do as you suggest and/or say "If you want me to spend next week digging into the details a bit more deeply I can, but it means I won't be spending much time on my current project. Your call." (And perhaps the estimate is important because of a product launch etc. Or maybe it's just a number on someone's status report.)

Best advice in this situation always give an upper bound estimate and fatten it up a little more. All they want is a number there is a damn good chance that it really doesn’t matter.

The reality—if you give me an estimate, I am probably going to fatten it up even further when I pass it up the chain, not because I don’t trust your estimate, but because something always happens outside of your and my control.

This advice is just soul-crushing.