Like at a Real Job®, the day the hounding starts is precisely the day you told them you would have it done. Or maybe a day or two beforehand: "Will it be done?"

Like at a Real Job®, the day the hounding starts is precisely the day you told them you would have it done. Or maybe a day or two beforehand: "Will it be done?" What does every boss say? Please communicate as soon as possible if you think the date is going to slip. Then everybody can recalibrate their expectations and you might get another little period of not being hounded. Though unfortunately it won't be as free of hounding as before, because your 2nd estimate will be trusted somewhat less than your first one, which turned out to be wrong. Some bosses, not the good ones, will say "You will meet the date, end of story." But what no boss ever says is "You need to meet this date, and if you can't, I don't want to know about it. Please obfuscate." Everybody knows a completely open phone is a hard job, but that ironically is the reason nobody believes the happy-face blog posts saying "Hi, everything's great!" I backed this project and I smelled something fishy as soon as they announced the "iterative shipping schedule." Not because I'm a crybaby who wants his phone now (in fact I opted for the latest possible shipment knowing the earlier ones would have "issues"), but because of how they tried to cloak the obvious and expected ("We're not ready") in terms of something straight out of Animal Farm ("We always planned it this way.") You tryin' to say you ain't ready dawg? Just say that. As usual the missing ingredient is leadership. You need somebody who's a compass needle, not a weathervane. You need somebody who's confident enough to tell the truth, warts and all, and who knows how to get everybody to love the warts. People will dump even more money and manpower in to help you if you do that.