Comment by vegetablepotpie

The ironic thing is that may have generated exactly the outcomes management wanted.

I’ve worked at places where it was more important for management to know what to expect than to achieve raw productivity towards a goal.

The people who were estimating in good faith may have assumed that management was acting in good faith. Whereas a lot of projects are created aspirationally or have artificially short deadlines to “motivate” people. The stress they incurred may have just been for the emotional satisfaction of a manager and not have provided any more value than that.