This gets a lot of teachers - the task is so ingrained in them that the only part they consciously understand is the trivial bit that everyone already gets. Breaking down a task and estimation are almost equivalent - once the breakdown is done, assigning estimates to the chinks of work takes a few minutes as anyone with a few years experience has some standard estimates for small tasks. In my experience I break down a task by biting off chunks that I can estimate, then ask for opinions on anything I can't.
Although I don't even believe the real path to mastery is the task breakdown. Anyone can come up with a bad breakdown. The real point of mastery, which he didn't talk about here, is identifying when the evidence suggests a task breakdown is incorrect enough to cause problems and communicating that / doing a re-estimate [0]. And being comfortable that it will happen so not getting stressed up front putting out a schedule that is likely to change. Managers generally want an accurate roadmap up front. This is them asking for the impossible. IMO Good management is about flexibility and understanding that the expected nature of the work changes as time passes and developers learn.
He has a little example at the end. Ponder that if someone had come to him with an accurate estimate ("you can do this in a few evenings as a plane trip") he'd have rejected that as too risky. That illustrates that estimating isn't even about accuracy, there are many unspoken factors here around risk management, expectation management, task familiarity, etc, etc.
Although I don't even believe the real path to mastery is the task breakdown. Anyone can come up with a bad breakdown. The real point of mastery, which he didn't talk about here, is identifying when the evidence suggests a task breakdown is incorrect enough to cause problems and communicating that / doing a re-estimate [0]. And being comfortable that it will happen so not getting stressed up front putting out a schedule that is likely to change. Managers generally want an accurate roadmap up front. This is them asking for the impossible. IMO Good management is about flexibility and understanding that the expected nature of the work changes as time passes and developers learn.
He has a little example at the end. Ponder that if someone had come to him with an accurate estimate ("you can do this in a few evenings as a plane trip") he'd have rejected that as too risky. That illustrates that estimating isn't even about accuracy, there are many unspoken factors here around risk management, expectation management, task familiarity, etc, etc.
[0] https://jacobian.org/2021/jun/8/incorrect-estimates/ - he has a post on the topic