At least when I was younger I was so perplexed by the kind of co-workers that have apparently chosen the profession of working with estimates from other people but continually work without a "confidence level" associated with each estimate.
("two weeks") means such a different thing in reality from ("two weeks", "confidence of 50%").
It's a tuple, it's always been a tuple, it's just downright silly to accept an estimate without the second half of the information. Like what diviniation is going on in that spreadsheet to communicate to others when it doesn't include half the meaningful information to begin with.
In this case why not just divide the estimate by the confidence to get the "true estimate" e.g in your example it's actually a 4 week. If you provide a tuple the confidence will eventually be conveniently dropped in some slide deck then the "2 weeks" will be socialised as the commitment.
The estimate-confidence relation is not linear. In my experience it follows some kind of S-curve, with 0% confidence approaching impossibly short times and 100% approaching infinity (like a logistic function).
I think software projects are best estimated as gamma distributions. To express that as confidence levels, you use the cumulative distribution function of the gamma, which are kind of S shaped, but stretched to the right.
You might imagine I disagree having written that flippant comment last night. On the contrary I've been on both sides at length over my career. While I find the tuple information somewhat useful (if I'm forced to provide semi-informed-guesses around timelines), I ultimately deep down agree with you wholeheartedly. The utility is moreso in having the conversation about why the confidence is low, which many methodologies have their own words and processes for.
("two weeks") means such a different thing in reality from ("two weeks", "confidence of 50%").
It's a tuple, it's always been a tuple, it's just downright silly to accept an estimate without the second half of the information. Like what diviniation is going on in that spreadsheet to communicate to others when it doesn't include half the meaningful information to begin with.