IT director for a multinational here: I apologize if this has been said, but here are a few reasons why these deadlines are set to be broken from the start: 1)

IT director for a multinational here: I apologize if this has been said, but here are a few reasons why these deadlines are set to be broken from the start: 1) estimating dev time is a hard (as in NP-hard) problem. Nobody in the world can do it well. Ultimately, deadlines are meaningless in terms of actual dev time. 2) being an engineer myself, I know full well that if I'm given a fair or comfortable deadline, I'll code the thing quickly and enjoy some free time until the deadline. When the deadline comes, we'll find out there was lots of bugs. We're lazy/efficient animals. 3) if I'm given a short deadline, I'll complain but will work much harder under pressure. I'll still deliver something with bugs, but they will be fixed quickly, still under pressure. And so we give deadlines that are far off the mark, sometimes knowingly, in order to make sure the actual finished, *debugged* product is ready by the time we make the announcement/presentation/sale.