Yesterday we had a great conversation about engineers and delivering estimates. I wanna talk about the other side of it too.

For managers and leaders. What do you expect out of engineers when it comes to estimates? How do you evaluate whether you're getting good estimates?

What do you *do* with the estimates you receive from engineers? How does it impact other work activities and timelines?

Finally, how does the ability to give confident estimates factor into how you evaluate your engineers?

Here's the thread from yesterday.

And to be clear. When I ask how you evaluate your engineers, I'm asking explicitly about performance reviews and ultimately promotions/raises.

I know that's a difficult topic to talk about in public. I hope we can get some candid discussion going. I'll share my own thoughts a bit later just like I did yesterday.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112367263499188111

Generally fewer takes on the management side of estimates. I think that's mostly due to my reach on mastodon being still pretty nascent. I appreciate the people who shared their thoughts in the replies.

FWIW, I expected to hear answers on how managers thinks about receiving estimates from engineers. And I did. What I didn't hear about yet is "here's what I do with the estimates once I get them."

I asked that question explicitly to try to create a bridge for engineers to understand the why.

I'll give some my own answers. The reason I need estimates from engineers is so we can do planning. It seems simple. But engineers sometimes don't often have an understanding of where their work is situated amongst other business activities.

In the case of B2B SaaS products, when engineering is close to shipping something new, other departments gear up to receive the handoff and make it turn into revenue. That usually means marketing pushes, sales calls, customer success follow-ups, etc.

If we say something is going to be done around this time, and it's not, that impacts other people's real work. This is a core truth that I often struggle to get engineers to engage with. When we say that dates matter, they picture mustache-twisting managers inventing arbitrary deadlines. That does happen sometimes. But it's not at all the norm. The norm is running a business where your work isn't the only work that matters. Coordinating all these activities requires people to commit to dates.