How are software engineers objectively measured when problems span such large difficulty ranges and there are multiple ways to implement solutions?

Question

Always been curious how “workload” is assigned and estimated for software engineers.

In: 92

Answer 1

Very vaguely. Big problems are broken down into small pieces that one can hopefully get done in a few hours or days. But sometimes there is a big problem, and more time is needed.

In an Agile system coders are constantly estimating how long tasks will take and updating them with how long they actually took. From this you can make better estimates in theory. Managers can use those estimates to get a general idea of when bigger projects will be done.

Problem is, few people can plan ahead for the problem they did not think of. Development is one long string of problems.