Bullshit Deadlines

Engineering leaders - most, probably 98%, of all deadlines are total bullshit. You and I know it.

They don't matter.

They don't move the needle.

They are pointless instruments used to induce anxiety, and diminish work quality, in the best case to meet myopic goals.

In the worst case they aren't even in the service of myopic goals, they are the ends themselves for literally no reason.

And to make things worse, they make things worse by every meaningful measure that you're trying to use them to positively impact.

Financial success. Customer satisfaction. Employee satisfaction.

And that's in video games, where people get into the industry because they are actually passionate about what they're building. They get in, and accept lower comp because they care about building something that people will enjoy.

I doubt the folks on your team give a shit about whatever B2B or B2C app you're building, regardless of whatever smoke they are blowing during the interview process.

Actual Deadlines

There are some deadlines that actually do matter.

Going to a conference or marketing event? This might be a real deadline. But even Apple has been willing to go on stage at WWDC and say they’ve got something coming later this year.

Have a contractual obligation? These deadlines are real because outside parties depend on you.

But you ought to be having a conversation with stakeholders about why you agreed to sell something before it was ready. That’s a recipe for disaster.

So what do we do about it?

As engineering leaders we push back against pointless deadlines.

If your stakeholders want to push a deadline, what are the actual negative effects if you miss it?

Really hold their feet to the fire on this. Is the negative real, concrete, and measurable. Or is it abstract fear and doubt that “we might miss our quarterly goals”?

Make it impossible to miss

If the deadline is real, make sure it will be trivial to hit.

Because you’ll likely have something come up that you weren’t anticipating as an organization that will throw the whole timeline off. And this only compounds if this is a deadline because another team is relying on it. (Besides, if they need it, why isn’t it on their roadmap?)

Because crunching to meet it kills morale, and causes your top performers to leave. This isn’t a winning outcome for the organization.

Don’t put a date on something you’re not working

Finally, do what you can to prevent your organization from promising things that aren’t done with any sort of timeline.

That way ends in pain, because until the team has capacity to pull the work, the organization is gambling that many previous bets are all going to turn up aces, in order to allow this one to pan out too.

You've got a limited pipeline. Either this is the single most valuable thing that the team could be working on, or it isn't. Work on that, and promise it when it’s ready.