Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

In order to influence your boss in this case requires understanding what is intended, so you can offer a better alternative. As you know, setting a deadline doesn't require that management believes bug fixing is predictable. They could well know it's unpredictable and set a deadline anyway.

You know your bosses better than I do, but all I can make from this example is a boss who wants to make fixing this bug top priority. Possibly the boss wanted to say, "Stop all other work until this bug is fixed" and then, thinking what that might bring -- after all, developers are lazy -- decided to set a false deadline. The intent seems to be to set priorities.

An executive once told us -- a small group of developers -- in a meeting that work must be finished by the deadline come hell or high water. We looked at each other and didn't know what he was trying to say. Obviously there are trade-offs here, so do we trade off quality? Features? What exactly was the executive thinking to sacrifice -- besides unpaid overtime of employees. That's a given.

Maybe the boss can remove obstacles or get help from other departments. These are things that bosses can do that you can't do. Maybe all the boss wants is to get you to say what the hold up is, for example "we need some more information from one of our partners", in order to assist you.

Maybe your boss gets colicky when bugs aren't fixed. You could suggest setting a zero defects policy, which more or less states that bugs are fixed before new features are added. This is one way to meet deadlines that trades off features in return for being able to ship more or less at any time.

It could be there's even a missing role here that you can fill over time. If you can be an expert at treating your boss as a customer, interviewing to discover what exactly is desired, and suggesting technical and management solutions, you'll be a great deal more valuable.

Bugs as a class have inherently unbounded time and effort to fix (or rather, they size as either "trivial" or "infinite pending investigation") but effort for individual bugs can be bounded by an assessment of how much time and effort to invest. Help your manager make this assessment by clearly delineating trade-offs. Help your manager help you and the team by clearly communicating progress and flagging unknowns/blockers.

1. Clarify the motivation for the time-box. Is there an externally imposed deadline? An angry customer? A dependency impacting another team or teams in the business? Is it more a matter of boosting the team's sense of priority/urgency and keeping a project from getting off track?

2. Clarify what outcomes are acceptable as "fixed" for the immediate deadline and whether you can do a mitigation to buy time for further investigation. Can you disable a feature, support partial functionality, do some filthy hack, temporarily do something manually, etc.? Try to give your manager some sense of the time/effort required for each possible solution or mitigation.

3. Share clear plans for investigating the bug, progress and findings so far, and next steps after the root cause has been identified. Be specific: "We have researched X, Y, and Z so far. Today, Bob will investigate Thing A and Alice will investigate Thing B. We'll give you an update by 2pm this afternoon."

4. If applicable, flag areas where lack of information or co-operation is blocking the team. DO NOT throw your team members or partners under the bus here, however, you can get into issues like "We're having trouble finding where to escalate questions for Legacy Service" and ask your manager for help.

I've used the words "clear/clarify" and "communicate" a lot here because those are the core issues. For your manager this isn't a philosophical discussion about the unknowable nature of software defects, this comes down to how to allocate resources efficiently for the business and how to reflect status to various stakeholders.

The discord you're experiencing in your career is real, and to some extent it comes with the profession. Companies are in the business of making working software on time. But you can't always make software work on time. This puts stress on you.

You're trying to get managers to stop setting bug deadlines on the theory that they don't understand that it doesn't help the situation. My assumption would be that they don't care that it doesn't help, they want me to do my job.

I've worked for management that not only showed no signs of understanding the nature of making software, but also didn't understand the nature of making money. A much more serious problem in my opinion. Their job is to bring in the business and your job is to make the software work on time.

It wasn't clear to me earlier that you may be dealing with executives by proxy of a project manager. That's a worse situation because you can't level with a project manager, they are stuck in the middle. You may want to go over his head (if you report to the p.m.) but if you do that, do not complain about him or anything else, bring only solutions and charm.

See my other comment for some more constructive and specific suggestions.

Agree, and will suggest generically that, fourth, that post-crisis, you sit down with your manager to understand and learn from the experience. Root cause of the bug? Root cause of not seeing it earlier? What made it become a firedrill? Net, how do we avoid a next-time?

In your particular case, it might help to understand what was at stake for your manager in this instance. You may gain some leverage from having come through.

Also, with partners who are integrating your stuff, it can help to provide a reference client or reference integration, so that they can see what you did to make things work - the partner would have helped you by self diagnosing.

Yes, this is correct response. This applies to both, bugs and feature deadlines. Early in my career, I would freak out whenever there were hard deadline, spent hours of personal time trying to meet deadlines. Now that I have friends in management and higher, I understand their motivations. They don't care about deadlines.

The best approach is to show concern, managers love meetings, so schedule a meeting to discuss. Don't fight back on deadline but try to understand seriousness and inform them of your status. Really it maybe waste of your valuable time, but your manager needs to report to their manager. They will love you for scheduling a meeting, you are speaking their language. Give them daily or weekly update via email or Slack. That shows them you are serious about deadline. They really just need to stay informed.

Finally, don't waste your personal time on fixing the bug after work. After 5PM spend time with your family and friends. Don't let management fool you in thinking that this is the last hard deadline. They will abuse you if you let them. It is just simple human nature. Don't let them abuse your coworkers either. It takes just one overzealous employee to destroy work-life balance for everyone.

Ever since I have realized that deadlines are mostly meaningless, I have missed many and there were zero negative consequences. In fact, opposite happens most of the time, management stop setting ridiculous deadlines. You just need to make sure you are doing solid work everyday for 8 hours and that's it.