Really? We have spike tickets all the time to go and explore a problem and see what edge cases we can find, explore possible solutions, and stuff like that. We usually scope spikes to a day or so. But we've had a couple where we were given almost a full week. The minimum I've spent was an afternoon and that was mostly because I actually found a lot of info a lot faster than expected.

Spike tickets are one of the funniest ways I’ve seen this handled. All it can really tell you is whether, in some short initial investigation, there is a known blocker, usually on the technical implementation side.

But the problems that make estimation useless are problems that only surface after detailed digging that takes time and cross-team communication not realistically possible in time-boxed spike tickets, involving happening onto things that were not known and could not be known within a short spike timeframe.

Spike tickets are just an Agile bureaucracy thing to paper over the fact that estimation is intrinsically problematic to some fundamental aspects of one-size-fits-all methodologies like Agile.

Essentially for a spike ticket to be helpful in the common case, you need a spike ticket that just says, “actually go and complete the whole task you’re trying to estimate and then come back and tell us how long it really took.”

We go off to investigate for scoping quite often. If you're not doing that, you're just guessing, which seems counterproductive.

Yet on the spot guessing is what most product managers and executives require.

That hasn't been my experience at all (major bay area tech co). PMs and execs who I work with are generally totally okay with "I'll get back to you by [date] with scoping and ETA for that request." We even have a name for it: we call it an "ETA for an ETA". It's much better to give an ETA-for-an-ETA and then come back with a real ETA once you know the scope, rather than just guessing an ETA that turns out to be totally wrong. Sorry if that hasn't been your experience; being asked to pull ETAs out of your ass without doing due diligence sounds like it would be demoralizing.

I’ve also worked for major Bay area tech cos, and your description hasn’t matched my experience in any of them.