Did you ever think time estimations are hard? If so, did you ever try adding your actual taken time months after working on a ticket?

I did by a year, but as no one really tracks my progress...

Yeah, that's a bitch. Since my work is quite dynamic and I have to differentiate billable hours, I have to fill in hours to some monthly tables, I end up filling rough estimates based on gitlab activity history.

I'm currently finding it very difficult to give clients an estimated time because most of the things I'm doing are things that i havent done before. I don't know how long it'll take because I don't know how long it'll take to learn. How have you all dealt with that?

@cmarshall10450 use a boxed period as base.
Say - you know that is took a couple of days to learn regexes for a specific project, and get a deliverable result. Based on that - you can estimate how long it will take to learn 3 new things, and deliver 3 somethings.

My problem with estimates is what the fuken PM, or the bigger asshole - my manager manager never tells me before I estimate deliverables... they think that I can somehow understand thier intent without any input from them. And when I ask what they meant - they refuse to answer. I am sick of seeing tickets with a single header line - without anything else in them.
(ノ°益°)ノ

@cmarshall10450 I've been there as well. There is no silver bullet for these kind of things. It really depends on the context though.

Who is the client in your setup? Are you a freelancer? Or is it your boss? Are you doing jobs for clients that are billed by management and do you bill on your own?

In certain aspects you just can't know until you have done it. If in doubt, give broad estimates depending on the project, e.g. "two weeks" or even "three months".

In some cases, I will be blunt and state "I don't know. I have never worked with the technology before. How much time will you give me figuring this out?"

As often, something has to be done and it doesn't really matter if it takes one day or three months. Other stuff is not as important, and there the estimation is used to figure out if it is worthwhile enough.

@magicMirror This is why I always want a BLOCKED or CLARIFICATION_NEEDED column in my boards. If I get such a ticket, I write a comment asking for clarification and assign the reporter. If they come to me asking me why it is not done, I politely say to them: "I need more information. I am no wizard." (If I don't have the column, I add it in the tile "[BLOCKED] Implement feature X".)

@magicMirror @k0pernikus
Thanks for the advice. For the project I'm working on just now, I'm the technical lead and the PM is in our parent company, who is managing a project for a client of their parent company (its a pretty complex setup).

@k0pernikus interesting idea. The Fuken PM never looks at the board, or his assigned tickets.
I will try to do some ticket ping pong next time, and see what will happen.