Comment by gnulinux

I'm a junior software engineer. My role in projects is usually optimizing pipelines for scalability, latency etc (though, I do occasionally implement new features too). I work in languages like python, SQL, C etc. So far in my career absolutely none of my estimations has been accurate. My underestimations/overestimations can vary a few days to a few WEEKS! Sometimes, I do some system analysis, find bottlenecks, develop heuristics to optimize those bottlenecks, implement the optimization but later find out now something else bottlenecks the system in a way it's almost as slow/unscalable or the optimization introduces a non-trivial bug. So it takes another round of analysis and optimization. I don't know if I'm just a trash engineer or estimation really is an extremely hard task.