Estimates are never good enough, when asked you're supposed to tell them two weeks before their guess. I recollect one project with a hard deadline. This land

Estimates are never good enough, when asked you're supposed to tell them two weeks before their guess. I recollect one project with a hard deadline. This landed in my lap during a worthless business trip while I had a fairly serious cold. I had about five weeks, all on my lonesome. It was critical. I had no time and no energy but tackle it I did. I had precisely one meeting with the person who issued the project, during which he made various Agile noises. This taught me something I would later come to expect about those sounds: I met with the stakeholders precisely zero times before delivery, despite my repeated asks. I worked evenings and I worked weekends to deliver something on time that was perhaps a little better than expected. And crickets. For five long months, nothing. I asked tentatively and was told I got paid whether or not it was in use. So this strangled two values for me: Deadlines, certainly. If I hear a deadline, I evaluate from where it came. If it is a nonsense deadline, I lose respect. False urgency is just a way of life with some people. Additionally, the "getting paid whether or not something was used" is an excellent way to develop apathy in an employee, it destroys the value of engagement. Sometimes real dates exist, and I'm all for that. Floods can be expected. But too often dates are picked out of a hat.