No, You Won’t Get It Done over the Weekend

Time is money and your manager doesn't want to get negative indicators

People may be scared of management, but hopefully they're reasonable. They're people, too. Most have some kind of understanding that sacrificing short-term productivity is counterproductive, both in that tired people make more mistakes and worse decisions, but also fed up people leave (super expensive and inconvenient).

Of course, your colleagues matter here. If they fail to set similar boundaries and expectations, one person isn't going to fix a dysfunctional environment. That's why it's important to work with professionals, and not people who devalue themselves and others regularly.

If it's right do it.

You owe it to yourself and your fellow workers to put yourself in a position that makes this possible. If you can live on 10K a year then when you earn 20K you must save the surplus.

It doesn't make sense to be afraid of your manager unless you're on some sort of abusive visa or something. You know this is your one life, there's no replay button, you can do the things right now that you'll wish you did in ten years time?

Some people live in denial. You do nobody any favors by encouraging their denial. Some people play stupid power and pressure games to ensure their employees aren't slacking. If you're already not slacking, you do nobody any favors by playing. Some people are between a rock (your estimates) and a hard place (their already agreed-upon deadlines). They're best served by a frank discussion of priorities, so you're hopefully slipping on the tertiary nice-to-haves, that they might even be able to negotiate away, rather than the core requirement they promised.

You don't necessairly need power to push back on unrealistic deadlines. What you might need power for, is to protect your weekends. But there's more forms of power than you've enumerated.

When there's a pattern of wanting my weekends, it's typically because they're trying to do too much with too few resources. What are they going to do - make things even worse, by spending more money to try and attract a replacement - and get less out of said replacement, until they get up to speed on the codebase - and maybe not get as much out of said replacement even then, if they're not quite as good as me at the specific thing I was doing? I'm a programmer living in a tech hub in the underpaid field of gamedev. I've got great BATNAs. I've got more options than they do. So do, I suspect, many/most "Software Developers" mentioned right in the subtitle of the article.

I'll work the occasional weekend once in a blue moon for something actually critical like a launch day. Management will often signal it's actually critical with commensurate compensation - time off, bonuses, or overtime pay. Or by not asking for my weekends in the first place until it's actually useful.

I'm sorry, but you do.

If the entire rest of your team accepts such nonsense, and you are the only one pushing back, you will soon find yourself out of a job.