For healthy working relationships and solid infrastructure you under-promise and over-deliver.
For maximal profit and sustainable business models you over-promise and under-deliver.
The company that under-promises won’t win the bid, though. Unfortunately the norm now is to overpromise, and then squeeze as many extra fees and concessions out of the project as possible.
There’s also a culture of contractors vs engineers where limits willingness to work together to find solutions. “not my fault”.
Well sure that’s fundamentally true, but really doesn’t give any sort of accurate picture of how estimates are done any more than “humans are just collections of cells” does, and anybody who does estimates without using some sort of data as the basis and is purely guessing is doing it wrong as fuck.
It’s not like we have no idea how long certain tasks have taken in the past, or what affects how long something will take.
