Ignore your manager's estimates. When the project is done, see who was closer to reality. When the project begins, the technical managers go off, meet with the business people, and come up with a list of features which they think would take about 3 months, but would really take 9. When you think of writing code without thinking about all the steps you have to take, it always seems like it will take n time, when in reality it will probably take more like 3 n time. When you do a real schedule, you add up all the tasks and realize that the project is going to take much longer than originally thought.
Reality sinks in.
Inept managers try to address this by figuring out how to get people to work faster. This is not very realistic. Anyway, in this market, adding good programmers is going to take 6 months. Not a big gain, and it's a bit like eating your seed corn. Boom, debugging time doubles .