The annoying thing for me is not necessarily that programmers are bad at estimating time but rather that programmers and others don't fully understand/appreciate that fact. People who don't understand it always seem to try and push developers to come up with timeframes that are either completely unreasonable or have so much padding that they end up being ridiculous. I think the solution to this whole problem is simply getting everyone involved to read articles like this and start leaning more toward managing priorities than setting hard deadlines.
But to counter my own point, the only reason why I think deadlines are good are for some people that don't put in a full effort unless there is a deadline. Even with that, however, the person setting the deadline should understand the estimates will be off and expect things may very well be late no matter how hard you push the developers.
