Sounds like you got someone with experience in hardware. They're all about just shitting a date on paper.

The key to good PMs seems to be that they will make up the fake schedule without even talking to you. The schedule will be made up either way, so if they can not bother me that's a ok.

I used to tell my bosses that everything would take three months. I would then ensure that everything took three months, usually by fucking off for two and a half months and then blasting something out in the last two weeks.

Isn't that what story points are for? :p

5 days seems pretty reasonable to design and build most stuff. It's function and system/integrated test that takes time not to say there's not random bits of work that take months before anything testable can be produced.

*My experience is in giant systems processing mainframe class data. The programmers in my team use COBOL

Uh oh. Now you're expected to be done in 5 days.

Which is when I just do it I tell them afterward. I build it into my estimates so it doesn't put us behind.

There are still a few cans that get kicked down the road though, for various reasons.

Nothing gets on my nerves more than when I fix something critical that's broken on a client site, and then get an earful from my PM because we didn't check with the client if they wanted it fixed, or they didn't have the support budget for that this month, or whatever else. I honestly think the management at my place want our client sites to be broken and stay that way, it's so weird.