I've had endless arguments with bosses about this very issue. I use exactly the same metric - my minimum estimation for any task is an hour for all the good reasons you list.

And yet I have gotten endless, endless flak for my time estimates.

To put this in perspective, I’m nearly always the fastest producer on my team; more, my estimates, while not really very good, are always better than everyone else’s estimates because I make some vague attempt to be realistic, to break down the problem into parts and make a good guess on each part — and not just tell the boss what they want to hear.

Classic example: the second time I came in a measly 10% under time budget for a project, my boss “had a talk with me about my estimates”. (It wasn’t even two in a row.)

I said, “But nearly all the time here, I underestimate the job. As an organization, we underestimate how long it’s going to take every single time, without exception. If these were actual estimates, then half the time we’d be under and half the time we’d be over.”

My boss, an actual engineer with a couple of decades’ experience, said, “That’s completely ridiculous.” So I gave him what he wanted — a pack of lies.

Thanks for an excellent article, or at least, one that agrees with my personal beliefs. 😀