41–50 of 67 posts
2. Ask how much they need it, meaning how many extra hours will they allow? And will they pay a bonus for those people who forfeit their evening and night just to get this fixed on time?
Chances are, the deadline will vanish as soon as it becomes obvious that there's a price attached.
I'll play Devil's Advocate here: there are sometimes critical business deadlines that absolutely require timeboxing a bug at the risk of losing a contract. I wish the world could conform to SDLC best practices, but sometimes reality is messy, and hindsight is 20/20. So that said, I think the real problem here is what you alluded: several people attempted unsuccessfully to solve it: how many man hours was this? How an…
Reality is messy, but what the OP describes is the denying rather than dealing with that reality. Putting a two day limit on a bug fix is not going to make what could potentially be two weeks of round the clock work suddenly become two days worth of work.
Don't be afraid too much. At most you'll be fired from a not good place, big deal. Software engineers are in demand.
I'd make a good faith efforts to help with the problem. And perhaps complain about the management behavior to their superiors. Let them square the circle.
I dont know what the bug is that you are dealing with. It could be a low level driver or enterprise web app. I cant emphasize enough that its important to be able to understand that problem, and that usually means you can make a map of the problems inputs and outputs work flow etc
Why you ask? Well look at the big picture.
A manager's ambitious is moving up the corporate ladder. To do this he takes up projects to prove herself. To complete the projects she uses the resources(people) assigned to her. Part of the resources are her core team, that she trusts and will carry with her when she gets promoted. The rest, which is the majority, will stay where they are for the next manager that will come along.
A manager would never give hard time-limit on fixing a bug to his core-team people. The people she trusts. The relationship there is completely different. So we know that you are part of the core team. Hence you have nothing to win career-wise for stressing and working extra hard.
Pushing back, asking questions, and in general being a pain in the ass is also not good career wise, as you may get negative visibility further above.
So the best thing you can do stay invisible, ignore and don't stress about it, and work as fast as you can, while not working more than what you get paid for.
If the bug is really critical and urgent then more resources will be allocated to help you with it.
In most cases however, that deadline is set to multiple people to help with manager's ambition.
So my advise is, relax, don't overwork, but don't rock the boat either.