Iron law: fast, cheap, good. You can never have all three.

Manager to engineer: Give me a ROM for this.

Engineer to manager: a ROM

Manager to engineer: No, that's too much (time/budget). Give me something that fits into this schedule and budget.

Engineer to manager: Some bullshit.

End result: Comes pretty close to the engineer's original estimate but badly misses the ridiculous bullshit that marketing demanded to win a contract.

Who can't estimate time? Yes, I know that you said that's out of scope for the article.