I really liked both articles because they're starting to get at a fundamental issue that is at the core of a lot of the management vs engineering conflicts that

I really liked both articles because they're starting to get at a fundamental issue that is at the core of a lot of the management vs engineering conflicts that tend to arise. Personally I've been in Rick's shoes where I've been overburdened with tasks simply because product management (not necessarily direct managers) committed to accelerated timelines without consulting with the engineers. Although I brought up distributing my load to my peers, it was always deemed that there "wasn't enough time" to train them and the cycle repeated. I was always sympathetic to my direct managers because they were given an unreasonable task and had no mechanism of providing "upward" feedback or adjusting the schedule. At the end of the day I was just putting more pressure on myself. After a few years I had enough and left the company in the interest of my own well being. At a conceptual level I think the issue is centered around making software a business. On one hand designing and implemented quality software is an iterative process and scales exponentially in terms of decision making (e.g. one week of technical debt can lead to months of problems). On the other hand businesses are deadline driven and function on a linear scale of time.