My point is, everyone calls their predictions "goals" and then if they do not reach those, it is for some reason, but external to themselves. It's normal to overfultil or underperform goals, this happens all the time. No one hits every goal 100% every time ("60% of the time, it works every time"), I guess no goal in your company is hit a 100%, it's either over or below.
Marketing has a goal of 5000 new customers. They do not estimate it by conversion history, outreach, customer preferences and other values in their model. But they could call it "estimate" with some thinking. But then they'd have the same problems of being "bad estimators" as developers are.
We in technology call our goals "estimations", and if we're "wrong" we are nailed for it. They are tied to our professional skill in a way goals never are.
Let's call our estimates goals as everyone else does.
Also: Many people confuse estimations and measurements. It's easy to sum 5 throws with a dice. I can do that hundreds of times correctly. It's impossible to predict the sum of 5 throws before the dice is thrown correctly all the time (only on average).
Marketing has a goal of 5000 new customers. They do not estimate it by conversion history, outreach, customer preferences and other values in their model. But they could call it "estimate" with some thinking. But then they'd have the same problems of being "bad estimators" as developers are.
We in technology call our goals "estimations", and if we're "wrong" we are nailed for it. They are tied to our professional skill in a way goals never are.
Let's call our estimates goals as everyone else does.
Also: Many people confuse estimations and measurements. It's easy to sum 5 throws with a dice. I can do that hundreds of times correctly. It's impossible to predict the sum of 5 throws before the dice is thrown correctly all the time (only on average).