I suspect many task deadlines are designed to force engineers to work for free

&gt;&gt;The engineer&#x27;s boss, an engineering manager, asks him how long a new task will take to complete. Sometimes the engineer has not done this particular thing before, so he responds honestly that he has no idea how long it will take. His boss will not accept that answer. He asks again. So, the engineer makes a wild guess and his boss responds with, &quot;That&#x27;s too long.&quot; Even if the engineer knows how long a task will take to complete and gives a realistic estimate, his boss often responds with, &quot;That&#x27;s too long. You have until Friday.&quot; When the engineer asks how long his boss has known about the task, the boss says he has known for a month. When the engineer asks why he didn&#x27;t tell him a month ago, the boss just looks at the engineer like he doesn&#x27;t understand the question.<p>If this describes your workplace, please find a better managed workplace if you can. They are out there<p>The correct way to do things here would be to:<p>1. Do a probe project to evaluate complexity and&#x2F;or look at similar projects<p>2. Trade time (deadlines) for scope and resources. Yes, we can deliver in a month, but only if we cut scope and get 2 more QA folks, etc.<p>EDIT 2a: You can also negotiate to trade time for quality and&#x2F;or take on technical debt knowing it reduces future velocity.<p>3. If neither of the above happen, you should trade absurdity for more salary&#x2F;growth. I&#x27;ve seen this at places such as hedge funds and consultancies and they compensate and &quot;pay&quot; for it with better comp and growth.

As a former product manager with lots of experience with both engineering and management: no, that&#x27;s not what deadlines are designed for.<p>Deadlines exist because software doesn&#x27;t exist in a vacuum, but other people depend on it being delivered. Whether so it can be sold to make money before someone goes out of business or a partnership fails, or its features arrive on time as promised for the start of the school year which can&#x27;t be moved, or as the foundation for another project that has its own equally valid deadline later on.<p>Deadlines exist because people need to make plans and be able to rely on them, which is how our entire society and economy function.<p>People work overtime in <i>every</i> industry to meet deadlines, it&#x27;s not just engineers. The only question is whether or it&#x27;s good for you financially.<p>Whenever you take a job, it&#x27;s up to you to do your due diligence in talking to other employees to find out what the working hours and flexibility are like in practice, and judge that against the salary, and decide if it makes sense for you.<p>Fortunately, there is <i>huge</i> variation in both salaries and expectations of hours per week, and the best thing you can do about places that pay little and work you long is to not take their job offer, or leave. Then supply and demand can do its thing and they&#x27;ll be forced to adjust or go out of business.

This is why film scheduling is a real discipline, while software scheduling is not. Film production is unionized, and overtime costs real money, at least time and a half, often more.<p>As I&#x27;ve mentioned before, there&#x27;s something called a &quot;completion bond&quot; in the film industry.[1] A completion bond guarantees third party investors that a completed, releasable film results, or your money back. Completion bond companies will take a shooting script and cost it out, then quote on what the bond will cost. It&#x27;s usually 3-5% of production cost.<p>Completion bond companies are thus very good at cost estimation. They keep records on what and who has overrun budgets in the past, and by how much, and adjust their estimates accordingly.<p>The completion bond company has several options when a film is in trouble. They can put people on set to watch where the money is going. They can put in more money, which is the first thing to be paid back when the film releases. As a last resort, they can <i>fire the director and producer</i> and put their own people in, to get something finished. That&#x27;s seldom done. &quot;Bad Girls&quot; (1994) is a film where that happened. It&#x27;s a terrible movie, but they got half the production cost back, which beats zero.<p>The threat of that happening keeps management in line. Big career setback for a director and producer when that happens.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eqgroup.com&#x2F;completion_bond&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eqgroup.com&#x2F;completion_bond&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve no doubt some folks do that thing with the intent described in the article &quot;force engineers to work for free&quot;.<p>But I also think people are really quick to imagine managers &#x2F; bosses to be Snidely Whiplash or something when really it&#x27;s more ignorance and bad choices and etc.<p>I wonder if the introverted engineering culture has something to do with it too?<p>I used to work in other fields until I started coding later in life. I&#x27;ve found a huge % of engineers asking about what to do about situations and my first question is:<p>&quot;Wait ... have you talked to your manager about this yet?&quot;<p>And the answer very often is &quot;no&quot; and they&#x27;re talking about really strong feelings of pressure and rage quitting is pretty shocking to me. This was very rare in other fields that I was in, but in engineering it seems surprisingly common.... Let alone the stories where it seems like the manager and the employee only talk during quarterly meetings and that&#x27;s it.<p>I think without any kind of relationship with your manager, team or employer can make a given situation seem like it is menacing, manipulative.... but you really don&#x27;t know.<p>Granted, there are bad managers who do such things intentionally, but if you talk to them you&#x27;ll probably figure that out too. If you don&#x27;t, you don&#x27;t know.<p>I&#x27;ve worked with plenty of folks who were very sure &#x2F; felt strongly about some management manipulation and yet I saw no reason to think it was occurring at all.

There&#x27;s a lot to unpack here.<p>&quot;So, the engineer makes a wild guess and his boss responds with, &quot;That&#x27;s too long.&quot;&quot; -&gt; You have a dysfunctional relationship with your boss. They don&#x27;t trust your estimates - whether based on their hubris, or your past results, or something else. You need to either find a way to reset that trust or leave the company and start anew with a new manager. Otherwise you&#x27;d going to have this same problem forever and neither of you will be happy.<p>&quot;Very often, if he chooses to do a lousy job, everyone seems happy that something was produced, even though what was produced may have been total garbage that was good for absolutely nothing.&quot; Reading between the lines here, this sounds like an engineer who wants to satisfy requirements that the project doesn&#x27;t actually have. In my experience, this often looks like an engineer who wants to add more adjectives (modifiability, robustness, scalability, etc) than is actually needed. If you delivered a result that the stakeholders are happy with, that&#x27;s a good outcome as an engineer. If you want to overengineer something, consider either doing it on your own time or switching to a job where, for example, more scalability, is actually a requirement.<p>&quot;In other words, if a boss is not totally clueless (which some seem to be), he knows an engineer can&#x27;t complete a job in three days that will take a month&quot; -&gt; the author clearly assumes their boss has a ton more insight into the engineering work than most do. Actual engineers working on a given project are usually pretty bad at estimating how long tasks will take - a manager (even a non-&quot;clueless&quot;, technical one) generally has very little idea how long something will actually take. Assuming that their manager knows and is intentionally screwing you over is just another sign that the author has a completely broken relationship with their boss and is incredibly bitter about it. They would probably benefit from a reset (eg at a new job).

I don&#x27;t know if I agree with the word &quot;design&quot;. In my experience most managers aren&#x27;t trying to design a way to force people to work for free (though that may be the unintended result). Most managers seem to fly by the seat of their pants and make up deadlines based on what will make the client&#x2F;stakeholders happy and not as some sort of malicious design.

IMO the whole &quot;we don&#x27;t pay for overtime&quot; thing with salaried employees is a scam that needs to be made illegal. There were times in my career (in the past now) where I had to put in 10-12 hours a day, and often without weekends just to meet the schedule, because some manager somewhere wanted the product for the trade show. I don&#x27;t see how this is reasonable, or why it should be legal, yet under the current US labor laws it is legal.<p>When I managed my own teams, the most I would ask folks to do is to very rarely work a bit more for a day or two (there are sometimes legitimate reasons why things need to be done by a certain date, or crises to resolve ASAP), giving them days off later to compensate. This was entirely voluntary, with NO repercussions, career or otherwise, if they don&#x27;t want to do it. There always were 3-4 folks who were happy to oblige. I&#x27;m also proud to say, that not once have I made anyone work over a weekend.

At a well-managed company that&#x27;s growing properly, such as Apple was from 1998-2012, this effect is employed in a way that compensates engineers very well via the gains in stock price.<p>If you&#x27;re a great engineer, it behooves you to see yourself as an investor in the company you end up choosing to work for.<p>This means learning about things like the disruptive growth era we&#x27;re in, how monetary policy affects growth, etc. You should know what an inverted yield curve is, and where to look to keep up with those charts (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;T10Y2Y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;T10Y2Y</a>).<p>It&#x27;s important to read Clayton Christensen &quot;The Innovator&#x27;s Dilemma&quot;. I also highly recommend reading ARK Invest&#x27;s research reports. They cost nothing but an email address, and I have found these all to be enormously valuable in my own research on this. If you just want to sit and watch some stuff on YouTube that can help, give &quot;Chicken Genius Singapore&quot;, &quot;Dave Lee on Investing&quot;, and &quot;Solving the Money Problem&quot; a whirl.<p>Great management is incredibly rare. But it&#x27;s on <i>you</i> to learn how to identify it. If you want to be paid the most, you have to know more than just the field you specialize in! There is little value in putting your head in the sand.

Usual disclaimer: does not apply to most civilized countries with mandatory overtime pay (including nighttime and weekend multipliers), maximum hours worked per week etc..<p>I&#x27;m still amazed that there is so much migration <i>into</i> the US at this point. (But I also do get it.)

The picture this paints of a career in software engineering is utterly unrecognizable to me, someone who has worked in this industry for well over a decade at this point. I can&#x27;t tell how much of this is pertains to whatever specific situation the author finds himself in vs. how much of it relates to the author&#x27;s worldview. If I treated team members like this author describes being treated, they would leave in an instant for any of the myriad of companies hungry for engineers that will not treat them like crap.

Leverage is your tool. If you don&#x27;t have enough, create more. You won&#x27;t get fired if they need you. You can always find a place that compensates you enough for your work. Forget about what the engineering managers want. What&#x27;s in your power? If you&#x27;re a professional, give your stakeholders a meaningful time quote. If they don&#x27;t like it, they can try finding someone who can satisfy their requirements. Or they can make sacrifices so that you can satisfy their requirements, given the amount of workers they have.<p>If you were selling someone watermelons, yet your client wants to pay you 50%, should you give it away for free? There are other people that like watermelons. And if he&#x27;s the only guy out there that likes watermelons, it&#x27;s time to start selling oranges.<p>Start cooperating. If your stakeholders won&#x27;t, find ones that do.

Hanlon&#x27;s razor is an aphorism, &quot;Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity&quot;

Marketing and Sales don&#x27;t seem to have much respect for the laws of physics. They aren&#x27;t deliberately assuming that engineers will work for free; they just don&#x27;t care.<p>I removed an anecdote, here, to protect the guilty.<p>Let&#x27;s say that you talk to a marketing&#x2F;sales person, and they give an absurdly optimistic estimate for a significant project.<p>So either they would deliver a steaming heap of garbage, at their estimate, or (more likely), the project would take a lot longer than the estimate. Since it is often a &quot;cost plus&quot; contract, we are unlikely to be happy with the outcome.<p>It would probably still be a steaming heap of garbage, but at a much higher price and months late.<p>The thing about late projects, is that there&#x27;s this huge rush to deliver all the features by the ridiculous date, and, when it gets there, you have this horrendous Rube Goldberg device that is a creaking, barely-usable bug farm.<p>All the rest of the time is spent trying to get it working properly[0]. It would consist of slapping kludge on top of kludge, until the result is 90% cruft.<p>Good estimation is a black art that no one I know has ever gotten right. That includes Yours Truly.<p>I have a friend that wants to do a fairly ambitious NPO project. I was unsatisfied with the interactions he&#x27;s been having with potential contractors, and just started to do the project myself, which includes adapting the backend (which I already wrote, taking seven months), and writing one of the frontends (which looks to be on track for a couple of months, at least).<p>As usual, it&#x27;s going about 50% slower than I had planned, but it&#x27;s definitely coming along. It will be really, really good, but quality takes time. One of the things that I do, is have a very loose project plan that solidifies as the project progresses. It really requires me working alone. Doesn&#x27;t scale well to teams.<p>Since I&#x27;m working on it for free, I guess that I&#x27;m a chump, eh?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NkQ58I53mjk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NkQ58I53mjk</a>

Is it unreasonable to expect someone being paid 300K a year to work more than an average of eight hours a day every once in a while?<p>It&#x27;s hilarious how when there is a general article about developer productivity, the comments section is full of people claiming how programming is not like manual labor that you can do for eight hours straight, and that most work in bursts of a few hours of intense intellectual activity surrounded by taking time off.<p>How many software engineers can, hand to heart, claim honestly that they put in 8 full productive working hours day after day the way a cashier or warehouse worker does?

I&#x27;ve seen this many places I worked. Probably most.<p>It&#x27;s especially prevalent in agencies, because the are two or more layers of this crap happening simultaneously.<p>First, the client does it to the agency, then the big boss does it to the managers, then the managers do it to the programmers.<p>I think it is also [connected with|the primary reason for] ageism in the industry:<p>As you gain experience, you learn to not fall for this kind of crap anymore.<p>When I was new and insecure, clinging to my job thinking no one else will hire me, I put up with all sorts of crap I wouldn&#x27;t put up with later in my career.

&quot;My suspicion is that this interplay between engineering manager and engineer is nothing but a game. Either to the manager, or to the company. Either it is a show of power by the manager, or it is a strategy for increasing the company&#x27;s profits. In other words, if a boss is not totally clueless (which some seem to be), he knows an engineer can&#x27;t complete a job in three days that will take a month. But, he must appear to be playing the company&#x27;s game. The company wants the engineer working unpaid overtime, as much unpaid over time as the engineer can possibly endure.&quot;<p>At my last job, this was definitely the case.<p>I&#x27;d come in with a realistic estimate, and everyone would be shocked. This is too much time, they&#x27;d say. How can we cut this down? There would be a discussion. We&#x27;d play a little game where we&#x27;d pretend we could cut corners over here and find efficiencies over there, and hey presto, we&#x27;d get it done in half the time. Now everyone is happy. Except nothing has changed. The job ends up taking as long, or longer, than the original estimate, but everyone has to work overtime to reach the deadline.<p>I suspect the same thing as the author; everyone knew we weren&#x27;t actually cutting the time down. We were just promising to get it done faster for free.

Wow, I suspect milage may vary depending on where you work.<p>I&#x27;ve only been at well run tech companies, and have a very different experience.<p>I would never refer to my manager as &quot;boss&quot;. Lol, I&#x27;ve rarely been told what to do next..<p>My current manager describes his job as &quot;herding cats&quot; :)

IMO, and this is what the engineers never get to find out, at the managerial level, a big concern is to keep the &#x27;labor&#x27; &quot;fed&quot; (fed here means fed with list of tasks). Meaning, an ideal for a manager in this aspect is to have tasks ready one after the other, so that there is no time during the work week where the engineer is under the impression that (s)he doesn&#x27;t have anything to do.<p>This is actually not easy. Real work, and real productivity is nonlinear. You have times of serious crunch, and times where there really is not much to do.<p>Entrepreneurs do this better, but in startups there is almost never a time where there is not much to do (there is always something to do). Or flat hierarchies, especially one where the boss is also an ex-engineer, also do relatively better.<p>This really gets worse in the case of org-chart hierarchies in established&#x2F;blue-chippy companies, where middle management, especially one that has no clue of tech work, solves this problem by creating pipelines of tasks that can safely be described as &quot;bullshit jobs&quot;.<p>Some middle managers decide to use up the pipeline in a way so as to keep the engineers occupied 60-70 hours a week, others 40-50 hours a week, something that varies from team to team.

This author is writing about a situation in which the employee is earning a fixed salary but his time is billed out on an hourly basis. That is very much a recipe for abuse, and may well have been designed to be exploited from the very beginning.<p>I&#x27;m curious to know how common this employment situation is in engineering. Perhaps only in the large consulting firms? But... aren&#x27;t annual bonuses supposed to compensate for the &quot;extra&quot; time?

IT director for a multinational here: I apologize if this has been said, but here are a few reasons why these deadlines are set to be broken from the start:<p>1) estimating dev time is a hard (as in NP-hard) problem. Nobody in the world can do it well. Ultimately, deadlines are meaningless in terms of actual dev time.<p>2) being an engineer myself, I know full well that if I&#x27;m given a fair or comfortable deadline, I&#x27;ll code the thing quickly and enjoy some free time until the deadline. When the deadline comes, we&#x27;ll find out there was lots of bugs. We&#x27;re lazy&#x2F;efficient animals.<p>3) if I&#x27;m given a short deadline, I&#x27;ll complain but will work much harder under pressure. I&#x27;ll still deliver something with bugs, but they will be fixed quickly, still under pressure.<p><pre><code> And so we give deadlines that are far off the mark, sometimes knowingly, in order to make sure the actual finished, *debugged* product is ready by the time we make the announcement&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;sale.</code></pre>

I think there is a better explanation here, one that does not require such nefarious motives. If you&#x27;re producing a physical product, then there is usually a more or less linear relationship between the amount of product you produce and the time and effort you put into producing it. If you can make a widget in an hour, then it probably will take you more or less two hours to make two widgets. The constant of proportionality can change with practice and according to skill, but there probably isn&#x27;t an order of magnitude of difference between an extraordinarily skilled factory worker and a moderately skilled one.<p>With engineering things are radically different. In engineering, and particularly in software engineering, everything is easy once you know how, otherwise it is borderline impossible. Most of the effort involved in engineering work is not in the actual work, but in the figuring-out-how. As a result, there can be multi-order-of-magnitude differences between the effort required by someone who already knows how to do something and someone who still needs to figure it out for the first time. This difference is most pronounced at the bleeding edge of theoretical research, where it can literally take decades to figure out something for the first time, after which the same problem (or variations on the theme) can be solved in minutes or seconds.<p>So the problem becomes: do you pay someone for their <i>efforts</i> or do you pay them for the <i>results</i>? Historically we&#x27;ve paid people for their effort because that was correlated with results, but that is no longer the case. But people tend to bristle at paying for results, particularly if they see that very little (apparent) effort was involved in producing it. There&#x27;s the old chestnut about the plumber who charged $100 for banging on a pipe. When challenged, the plumber produced an itemized invoice: $5 for banging on the pipe and $95 for knowing where to bang.<p>Engineering problems are often solved by taking a shower. But Harvard MBAs don&#x27;t like to pay people to take showers. We really need a radical re-thinking of the whole compensation model for this kind of work.

This write-up indicates a serious problem in the org:<p>- the tasks are not scoped and thus arbitrary dates are given<p>- the tasks are not scoped and thus no trade-off discussions are had<p>Every time I had to work crazy hrs it was for a good reason in decent companies. Examples being: We literally don&#x27;t have the money to operate if xyz doesn&#x27;t get delivered by a specific date. Cut what you can, but not what is critical.<p>With good managers &#x2F; execs you always debate between what they want build, and what can be built given current realities.<p>If your company just throws arbitrary dates and wants the perfect product expecting you to work like mad... there is a problem in that company.

I hope the author and the 200 upvoters find better employment soon. The tone of the article suggests that this is assumed to be the universal way of software development, but it&#x27;s basically the opposite of how things are done at my workplace. OP&#x27;s company sounds like it&#x27;s run by some Charles Dickens villains.<p>My manager only gives me a few tasks per year, mostly administrative things like peer reviews that everyone at the company needs to do. All my real work comes from my team&#x27;s product owner (not in my reporting chain, aka a product manager), who defines objectives and sets priorities for my team. My fellow developer teammates and I collaborate to give an estimate for the objective, architect a plan for it, break it down into smaller &#x27;stories&#x27; that ideally take less than a week each to complete, and then actually implement those stories with programming. If we don&#x27;t know enough to estimate something, we&#x27;ll make a task devoting some time to researching just enough for an estimate. It&#x27;s always collegial, often fun, and very efficient at producing high quality software on a predictable timeline.<p>But my employer&#x27;s product is basically a SaaS and the author works at a consulting company that rents our engineers by the hour. Is this kind of dysfunction the norm at consulting companies?

Perhaps. But in my experience as an engineer, there is a widespread human tendency to take requests into a cave and not come out until something too &#x27;opinionated&#x27; is built. When creating for&#x2F;with others, often what is preferred is a &#x27;dialogue&#x27; approach, because everyone has an opinion on what to build. If a product manager asks you to build a Twitter clone, which you reply would take a year, and they counter with &#x27;you&#x27;ve got two days&#x27;, then make a 2-day Twitter clone. You might build just a couple of key interactions, and it might only operate at toy-scale, or you might just write a bunch of stubs that print out what the system would do, but in general, if someone counters in response to your estimate with a request to do it in 1&#x2F;x of the time, they are usually communicating &quot;I don&#x27;t need something built to that level, I want a 1&#x2F;x pass of what you imagine&quot;.<p>So really these aggressive deadlines are more about project stakeholder&#x27;s desire to have more control over the design process. Of course a creator might not want to share control, but that is a different issue to &#x27;being forced to work for free&#x27;.

If this is true, it&#x27;s too focused on engineering. This is project management in general, not just for technical jobs.<p>But I also think the author gives too much credit to management. There&#x27;s no conspiracy to tighten deadlines to get free work, at least not in a vast majority of places. Hanlon&#x27;s Razor comes in to play here: don&#x27;t attribute it to malice if it can also be attributed to stupidity.

&gt;&gt; Unfortunately, many of our companies appear to have become Orwellian machines that put these people in power, and once there, they create utter chaos for the rest of us.<p>I keep saying this because it&#x27;s relevant to so many topics and so many problems that people talk about these days...<p>The way all newly &#x27;printed&#x27; money enters into our economy is through big financial institutions - This means that the financial institutions are in the position of choosing who will get a share of that new money (which the Fed printed out of thin air). Once you understand that the global monetary system is a scam, you&#x27;ll understand why psychopaths rise to the top; because the psychopaths who run the world can&#x27;t rely on altruists to keep their mouths shut.<p>If you don&#x27;t believe me, just watch Hidden Secrets of Money: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DyV0OfU3-FU&amp;t=2s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DyV0OfU3-FU&amp;t=2s</a><p>The good news is that this is likely a sign that the system is on the brink of failure.

In my experience many (though not all) deadlines are simple mitigation of Parkinson&#x27;s Law[0], not exploitation of workers. I don&#x27;t work in the commercial game industry though, so YMMV.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Parkinson%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Parkinson%27s_law</a>

I&#x27;m sure none of this applies to any of us here, but I&#x27;ve heard rumors that some people <i>need</i> deadlines to complete tasks. As in you set a deadline, and it doesn&#x27;t really matter when, and check up with the employee on a regular basis. The interim feedback is always that things are coming along, but there is an awful lot of office chit-chat, browsing Facebook when I walk by, etc.. And then one week before the deadline all of a sudden there is griping and moaning about crunch time, but now there is sudden focus, and things get done. I&#x27;m a new manager, so I wish I had a better way to work with this dynamic. Smaller milestones? How small before it becomes micromanaging? But to the main point, if you are routinely working 70 hours a week that is a toxic work environment and you should leave.

This is one of those times when you shouldn&#x27;t attribute malice (or greed, I guess) to something that ought to be attributed to incompetence.<p>I&#x27;ve been a PM for long enough to have dealt with lots of situations like this, and never once have I had the slightest inkling that there was any plan to overwork engineers in order to get them to work for free.<p>The good companies I&#x27;ve dealt with understood that engineers are vital to their success and try to make them happy. The short term benefits of getting free work by bullying them with deadlines doesn&#x27;t outweigh the downside of them leaving.<p>The bad companies just don&#x27;t think like this - they want cheap labor so they outsource engineering to the cheapest possible places.<p>Based on this post, I would strongly recommend the author get a new job.

Having a job is an abstraction. It allows you to trade predictable effort for predictable pay. Deadlines are an abstraction leak: Ultimately, market dynamics and business P&amp;L exists, it can&#x27;t be totally ignored in a healthy organization.

The irony though is that the code that is written is shit and will cost the company so much to maintain, which eventually leads to that shitty manager being fired. The poor souls are the ones who need to maintain that crap software after

This is interesting because one of the first project scoping lessons I learned was that engineers rarely give accurate time estimates. I would always go back to my boss having tacked on 20-30% of the time and make sure it’s clear that it’s an estimate and could take longer.<p>Who wants a product that was rushed? If there’s not enough time, cut scope.<p>As a Project&#x2F;product&#x2F;eng manager, it’s my job to buy time, hit the dates I set, and make my boss more $$$. If I’m saying stuff like “a month is too long; you have until Friday,” I screwed something up or got screwed by someone else. Regardless, the engineers should leave because it’ll keep happening.

I&#x27;m only about 8 years into my career and if there is one thing I&#x27;ve come to realise, it&#x27;s that a good chunk of deadlines are arbitrary dates plucked out of thin air.<p>We as engineers are horrible at guessing how long something things. I&#x27;ve yet to meet anyone who has been able to accurately guess how long a certain task takes. Rightly so, because engineering wouldn&#x27;t be engineering if all the problems were already solved.<p>If you&#x27;re in a workplace that imposes arbitrary dates on you, you should probably look elsewhere. There are better companies out there.

Also has the effect of having most engineers with a track record of &quot;missed deadlines&quot; and &quot;failures&quot;. So they are continually in fear of their managers and review time.

It isn’t just engineers—it’s all employees. Deadlines are often unrealistic or arbitrary. It’s just something to use as a cudgel to beat your employees over the head with.

&gt; The company wants the engineer working unpaid overtime, as much unpaid over time as the engineer can possibly endure. This is why so many engineers at some companies routinely work 70 hour weeks.<p>I am fine doing (justified) overtime, but there&#x27;s no way I will do this from the goodness of my heart. Some additional work is required for the upcoming release? No problem, but make sure to plan some overtime reduction for me next month.

Hm this article describes a bureaucratic management nightmare BUT, the opposite is also bad.<p>Parkinson’s Principle is real.<p>If you give yourself a long time to complete a project, it will take that long. Also many projects are a total waste of time. It’s often a good strategy to get the smallest possible experiment (to test your hypothesis) in front of customers ASAP and get the feedback loop rolling before you sink months into something untested.

My pet peeve was managers that didn’t ask for an estimation and said to be done in Feb 2021 and then forced you to work late&#x2F;do overtime while they went home at 5pm every day. Long ago I decided if the (project) manager can’t be arsed to be around, to answer questions, arrange dinner, why should I work late? If it’s not that important for the manager stay late too, even to give moral support.

This seems to be describing a particular problem of working at an engineering consulting company. I have never had this experience in my career.

Thank you so much for this. I think you have managed to strike a perfect balance in tone -- no small task.<p>You are quite direct in your message and do not sugar-coat any of your points but still avoid sounding &#x27;bitter&#x27;.<p>It has been my direct experience that the phenomenon you describe seems to be widely in practice at this point, across many organization of different size and disciplines.

It&#x27;s not like that where I work. Scheduling and tracking tasks is hard but it sounds like the author needs to find a new job.

If this is you, then quit. You’re not cattle, and there are better environments to spend your time in.

Don’t need to read the comments to know mine is redundant but whatever drives one to leave comments on websites compels me.<p>I have never worked in such an environment and don’t see how one could.<p>You can demand someone jump off the building but not onto it.<p>If there isn’t enough time, then there isn’t enough time.

&gt;It probably has something to do with the fact that large engineering companies can afford to hire lobbyists and engineers cannot.<p>i&#x27;d lobbyists for employees are called unions. you can afford to hire lobbyists by paying union dues.

A lot of the comments on here seem to have missed the fact that this is about _engineering firms_, not tech companies that employee &quot;software engineers&quot; and what have you. It&#x27;s not the same world at all.

It started well and devolved into a bitter rant about the universe. So... here&#x27;s some perspective from a career on both sides of the table.... (manager and engineer)<p>- For many teams and personalities, it is very hard to ship anything without a deadline. (as a solo founder, I actually use this psychology on myself to stay on track.)<p>- Short chunks and deadlines work better than longer ones.<p>- Peer pressure is a powerful stimulant.<p>- Your time is not of equal value. You don&#x27;t really have seventy hours of quality work in a week. You&#x27;ve got maybe 15 &quot;truly inspired&quot; hours, 25 &quot;grind it out&quot; hours, and a lot of filler, face time, and paper shuffling after that. If you&#x27;re smart, you slip in some employer funded personal growth &amp; education time into that mix.<p>The classic mistake is to screw up the mix. I actually run into this as a freelancer. My rate for &quot;truly inspired&quot; time (real thinking about theory, architecture, influencing others, lecturing, or consulting on high level topics - eg. I must be fully present and prepared) is between $150 - $500 per hour (depending on the degree to which I&#x27;m inspired by the topic in question; $500 if I couldn&#x27;t give a crap, $150 if I&#x27;m truly interested), &quot;grind time&quot; is $75 - $90 (you&#x27;re paying for work without face time or deep insights, done at my convenience), and I&#x27;m unsure how to sell people filler, face-time, and paper shuffling. My typical solution is to go take a nap.<p>By the way... once you deduct pitching and running the business (10 hours, mix of inspired &amp; grind), that means a freelancer REALLY has only 20 - 25 hours of useful time to sell in the course of a week. Past that, you&#x27;re either working much harder than an employee or trying sub in filler and hoping your client doesn&#x27;t notice it...<p>The typical employee is selling 15 - 25 hours of grind, perhaps 5 of inspired time (if you&#x27;re lucky) and as much filler and self-directed time as you can get away with. From an employee satisfaction perspective, inspired is a win, filler &#x2F; self-directed time is neutral to a win (depending on how well you entertain yourself), grind is a negative. Grind time is less onerous if you feel like you are accomplishing something in the process.<p>My goal as a boss is to get as much grind &#x2F; inspired time for my buck as possible, since that&#x27;s what generates output. (employee development matters but is a complex payback balancing future productivity &#x2F; retention &#x2F; motivation; filler doesn&#x27;t really help me at all) The essential management challenge is spotting people slipping filler into a day and telling them to get back to grind. Good bosses protect your inspired time. Someday I&#x27;ll hopefully get to work for one again.... (LOL)<p>There&#x27;s nothing REALLY wrong with doing an 80 hour sprint one week if you can engineer some paid downtime later. I have weeks where I&#x27;m exploited and - to be fair - others where I&#x27;m massively overcharging my employer. It evens out.

I had a co-founder who really thrived on challenges. Not impossible deadlines, but almost &quot;I dare you to do this by Monday&quot; kind of thing.

Here is the thing: most developers have very weak personalities. So yes, the sociopaths figured out that by stressing the engineers, they can get more work done, until they burnout at least.<p>You owe it to society to let a deadline slide by a large margin.

If you don&#x27;t stand up for yourself, and accept whatever shit people throw at you, then you will get crushed.

In Europe, giving employee less time than it&#x27;s needed to complete a task is called mobbing.

I figured this out shortly before I started my career and screen out these kinds of employers.

Is this article set in the late 90&#x27;s. Times have changed, get a new job.

I have an impression that the article is about programmers, not engineers.

Penny dropping..<p>Now to figure out how to set boundaries in the abusive relationship.

From a good manager of mine, &quot;deadlines are cost control methods, unless we sent an email to a client or there&#x27;s some pending legal requirement, those deadlines are to keep the costs of a project from skyrocketing&quot;.<p>2 years later, only two deadlines have ever been set in stone: the GDPR one and one we sent an email from Marketing about. I think he was right.

I&#x27;m going to provide a contrarian opinion here:<p>Managers do this because engineers can rarely be trusted to estimate timelines properly, or at least communicate them. Or it&#x27;s a rare engineer who does this well.<p>Either they don&#x27;t even think about timelines, or they grossly underestimate the amount of time that something will take, find dependencies that add a week of unexplained time to fix, or handwave off the parts with least clarity, assuming it will be straightforward. And then you find out it actually takes double the time to do it properly, or the original timeline produced an output that was fully of bugs in the edge cases.<p>So, what happens, managers start to not trust when engineers give estimates, make up their own more &quot;believable&quot; estimates, and also start to expect that if they compress the timeline, it won&#x27;t be a major issue because the engineering team is putzing around with non-essential work anyway.<p>So, if you want managers to respect and work with realistic timelines, you&#x27;d better give them a solid track record of delivering what you said you would in the past.<p>There&#x27;s blame to go around.

Engineer here, i can’t relate to this. Find a new job.

It goes both ways. Many weak deadlines allow engineers to slack off when they otherwise might not have.