I was recently asked if I thought estimating is a valuable skill for a software engineer to develop. This is a deceptively simple question that everybody is quick to affirm. One of my favorite parts of Stripe is that our operating principles are practiced and it’s encouraged, when reasonable, to pause and reason through from first principles. I’m also heavily influenced by the Toyota Production System which tries to tie every action into value for the end user. I reframed the question to “Why are accurate estimates valuable to our users?”
