Software Engineering Deadlines
Discussions center on the arbitrariness, necessity, and impact of deadlines in software engineering, including managers imposing unrealistic timelines, experiences with missed or fungible deadlines, and debates on balancing deadlines with quality and productivity.
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Given how deadlines/timelines tend to (not) work in SWE, this is not surprising.
Here is something i encountered, sometimes higher ups will put arbitrarily deadlines and act like the entire business depends on you meeting that deadline for a project and after that deadline passes no one seems to care that much about your product, they even allow you more time to do it "right".
Artificial deadlines are not compatible with quality assurance, so the solution is... drop the artificial deadlines.
βOur developers need deadlines. If I donβt give them a deadline, the work will never get done.β β Many, Many Managers
Companies shouldn't have deadlines?
Same, but even missing the deadline was realistic.Manager: This is urgent, fix it today. Dev: Rush rush, miss deadline.Manager: Ok no problem, let's move the deadline by a week just in case.
Set deadlines and just ship it...
I think you need a way to have deadlines, without that you can easily fall into over engineering or completing other unrelated tasks.
At least everywhere I have worked, deadlines generally come down from on high, often with no real developer input. If you are lucky, your manager will be successful in fighting for more time. If you somewhat lucky, the missed deadline will be ignored. If you are unlucky, the deadline will approach and people will suddenly disappear.
why are you letting clients impose deadlines? That's your job to tell them.