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artificial deadlines really don’t seem to mesh with hacker and startup culture. also, the FAANGification of HN’s posts is really a bummer. lately this just seems like a mainstream news site for large silicon valley companies and culture instead of the culture that built those companies.
artificial deadlines really don’t seem to mesh with hacker and startup culture. also, the FAANGification of HN’s posts is really a bummer. lately this just seems like a mainstream news site for large silicon valley companies and culture instead of the culture that built those companies.
Right, this content belongs on LinkedIn (and r/LinkedInLunatics)
You don’t need to lie to have that conversation.
> It’s completely ok to not have anything external happen when the deadline arrives! That doesn’t mean the effort to meet it was wasted. You built trust with the rest of the organization and you freed yourself to work on other things. Does it usually motivate people to work hard, when they know the outcome of the crunch is "more trust with the rest of the organization" and "now I can work on other things"? Sounds pre…
Every place of work where I saw that being pushed and accepted once, then crunch just became the new norm over time, 100% of the time.
Developers accepting the crunch to please management, signals to management that they can outsource the externalities and consequences of their bad estimations and planning onto the developers without consequences while they collect the bonuses for the deadlines being met.
While on the other hand, pushing against the crunch when/if you can, forces management to be more careful and realistic with expectations, basically to do their fucking job right.
The author writes "Once I became a manager, I finally saw why they were needed, but felt guilty about using them."
You SHOULD feel guilty. Truth matters. Trust matters.
If you're having problems with estimation and planning, then success looks like working on these areas-- not faking them.
Good tactics to try are work breakdown structures, planning poker, transparency for timelines, good project management tooling, critical chain scheduling, and above all trusting your teammates.
The "why they were needed" is some guy with exponentially more university connections than sense trying to squeeze the engineering department for his bonus.
Don't lie to your employees, you snotball.
Deadlines aren't for tech teams. Their for anal upper management more concerned with quarterly financials than deliverables and stake holders who fundamentally do not understand how tech works. When someone asks for a deadline, the answer should be "it gets done when it gets done." But if you are a technical who is being asked, the correct answer is the real estimated timeline + at least 2 weeks, depending on complex…
As an engineer, I don't like deadlines either given how unpredictable large scale software development can be, but the fact of the matter is that most software is in service to a business, and businesses need to run on schedules. If you don't like that, you shouldn't be working in a software business, you should be working in a research think tank or academia.
> It’s completely ok to not have anything external happen when the deadline arrives! That doesn’t mean the effort to meet it was wasted. You built trust with the rest of the organization and you freed yourself to work on other things. Does it usually motivate people to work hard, when they know the outcome of the crunch is "more trust with the rest of the organization" and "now I can work on other things"? Sounds pre…