> You are misunderstanding your job. You are a subject expert and paid accordingly. Answer with what the unknowns are, an optimistic and pessimistic take on them, what you could do and how long it would take to lift them.

Add a small feature to an existing system. This estimate can be anywhere from several months to a day. Most of the error bars are org and system specific rather than anything to do with the feature. The exact same feature built by the same person in different orgs and different systems can be opposite ends of the range.

Seldom do people have the contextual understanding to provide an accurate narrow estimate, particularly since both org and system are in flux. They change constantly. Unseen landmines potentially await in both.

> If you don’t, your boss is going to ask you for exactly that in a roundabout way and micromanage you because you are forcing them to do your job.

And such orgs take forever to get anything done.

> It still baffle me than approximately half of developers don’t understand things which are obvious to any seasoned blue collar worker.

Software is probably the hardest kind of engineering you can do. All the system constraints are virtual. Just consider comparing a dirt ground for consistency and behavior vs libc... 304 stainless vs react.

You can go deep in both, but a shallow understanding of one takes you much much further than a shallow understanding of the other.