Estimates became ironic

The chronic misestimation of development effort has led to some Dilbert-esque observations of the way we work.

For example, we would often refer ironically to a task as just a "small matter of programming," when someone with little or no understanding of what was involved was telling us it looked easy.

We also developed ironic laws about underestimation such as the Ninety-Ninety rule, which states the following: 

This rule was later made popular by Jon Bentley's September 1985 Programming Pearls column in Communications of the ACM, where it is titled "Rule of Credibility".