Here’s my one key observation after 35 years:
Whenever someone refers to planning as “lies” and whines about “politics” … you can be sure they are a difficult person who blames everyone but themself.
Whenever someone refers to planning as “lies” and whines about “politics” … you can be sure they are a difficult person who blames everyone but themself.
In many places estimates are actually lies. There are even plenty of companies where realistic estimates, and well planned projects will get you sidelined. These are often places that reward for fire-fighting rather than planning, and where your value is judged by how busy you appear to be rather than how efficiently you work.
It's important to understand which kind of company you are working in, and if you understand that, then you can adjust your behavior appropriately, and succeed within the environment.
I'm happy to be working in a place that rewards for planning, but I've worked in places where detailed and accurate planning was punished. Oddly enough, this division is surprisingly disconnected from whether the business is successful or not. A good business model will cover a multitude of technical sins.
You can't have large groups of people making decisions without politics, and anyone saying otherwise is kidding themselves. You either play the game and pick a side, or someone picks it for you and you get what you get.
Keep in mind this is entirely separate from ruthlessness or backroom deals; this is just the way of things with large groups of people.
I believe it's all about size. Small tasks can be estimated fairly precisely, with 30% margin maybe. But some people extend this logic to huge projects and this simply doesn't work.
I give you example: I was once asked to estimate the amount of work needed to migrate a huge org from on-prem to one of the public clouds. Without even knowing what kinds of app they were running. I said I can only do a very rough estimate and there are too many variables to be precise. But they insisted and hired someone else to do this job with the precision of half-day!
Needless to say, their estimates were too optimistic because they could only include what they knew. By design, they couldn't measure the things they know nothing about because these issues haven't appeared yet. Last time I checked, they are still migrating and I have a feeling they will finish around the time I had originally planned, that is the second quarter of 2024.
The situation you described seems quite broken
But I'll stop whining about politics when I'll stop witnessing well-behaved but incompetent people turn projects to failures.