You know how long your budgeted for it. Which is fine up to a point, but when things go over budget then corners get cut. And that costs in time further down the road.
I suppose you can always spend more time but the type of work I did didn't create downstream dependencies. There was no maintenance. (It was reports, competitive analysis, and the like.) Although I can't ever recall a situation where we were like:"It's not good. But it's good enough. Ship it."
That’s the kind of work that can be automated. You’re arguing with people who are doing new feature development almost exclusively. These are apples and oranges.
And frankly if you get too smug about it in a work environment you’re going to antagonize someone into scripting your job out of existence. So I wouldn’t pull on this thread too hard if I were you.
