5 ms·

No idea how things work at Amazon, but why did you accept such a tight deadline? Have you provided your own estimates for dev time?

ngc248 5y ago
In big companies, there is program management which comes up with the overall schedule. There will be buffer time, but you still have to work within the given time whatever challenges there may be.
slt2021 5y ago
amazon has Leadership Principles (corporate koolaid) that makes deadlines top-down and non-negotiable, otherwise you are deemed as not meeting a bar
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  What if the deadline is fundamentally impossible? No room for leeway here?
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    At one company I worked for, they fired the product manager, then fired all of them.
  - altacc 5y ago
    Then either the people given the deadline are being "managed out of the business" or they should be managing their own way out And yes, I've been a manager in a company where the phrase "managed out of the business" was used. I no longer work there.
    - bregma 5y ago
      The term that is usually used in law is "constructive dismissal".
      - DarylZero 5y ago
        Yet you still won't get those unemployment checks if you were a new hire.
      - altacc 5y ago
        Management would tell you it certainly wasn’t constructive dismissal as that’s illegal! ;)
- hughrr 5y ago
  That’s why I never touch a new Amazon service for 12 months.
greatpostman 5y ago
I was naive but it wasn’t really negotiable. Don’t meet the deadline by a large margin? Expect to be out of the company relatively soon. I think this particular team was much more hardcore than other parts of the company. Most of the horror stories come from the core amazon services
MattGaiser 5y ago
At least everywhere I have worked, deadlines generally come down from on high, often with no real developer input. If you are lucky, your manager will be successful in fighting for more time. If you somewhat lucky, the missed deadline will be ignored. If you are unlucky, the deadline will approach and people will suddenly disappear.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I mean the project management triangle comes into play then, and when it comes to SWE, throwing more money at a problem usually doesn't make it go faster. Basically the higher-ups have to decide what is most important; if the deadline is fixed, then the scope HAS TO BE flexible.
  - thinkharderdev 5y ago
    There's a basic communication problem IME. When I've been in this position (an impossible deadline) it's been because some Sr VP or C-suite type decides that something HAS to be done by a certain date. Like, they want to unveil a new product/feature at CES or some other trade conference so the date is fixed. So this filters down through 3-4 layers of management to you, the dev lead who actually has to build the thing. You take one look at it and it is basically impossible and you can list the 17 reasons why. BUT the problem is that the person that needs to be convinced is the Sr VP/C-suite type. So your analysis has to go back up, filtered through 3-4 layers of managers, each less technical than the last. And of course nobody in that chain wants to disappoint their boss so they hedge/soft-pedal your analysis at every layer. Now the SVP/C-suite type, who typically does in fact have good reasons for wanting this project done by whatever deadline they set originally, only gets a watered-down, possibly incoherent version of you analysis of why the project is impossible by the given deadline. Not surprisingly, they don't find it convincing. tl;dr; everything in a large corporation is a game of telephone where everyone is incentivized to muddle the message. So any deadline/commitment handed through multiple levels of management is really difficult to negotiate. And the more unrealistic it is, the harder it is the negotiate. Nobody wants to tell their boss that the thing they want done in 3 months will actually take 2 years.

ngc248 5y ago

In big companies, there is program management which comes up with the overall schedule. There will be buffer time, but you still have to work within the given time whatever challenges there may be.

slt2021 5y ago

amazon has Leadership Principles (corporate koolaid) that makes deadlines top-down and non-negotiable, otherwise you are deemed as not meeting a bar

deltaonefour 5y ago
What if the deadline is fundamentally impossible? No room for leeway here?
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  At one company I worked for, they fired the product manager, then fired all of them.
- altacc 5y ago
  Then either the people given the deadline are being "managed out of the business" or they should be managing their own way out And yes, I've been a manager in a company where the phrase "managed out of the business" was used. I no longer work there.
  - bregma 5y ago
    The term that is usually used in law is "constructive dismissal".
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      Yet you still won't get those unemployment checks if you were a new hire.
    - altacc 5y ago
      Management would tell you it certainly wasn’t constructive dismissal as that’s illegal! ;)
hughrr 5y ago
That’s why I never touch a new Amazon service for 12 months.

greatpostman 5y ago

I was naive but it wasn’t really negotiable. Don’t meet the deadline by a large margin? Expect to be out of the company relatively soon. I think this particular team was much more hardcore than other parts of the company. Most of the horror stories come from the core amazon services

MattGaiser 5y ago

At least everywhere I have worked, deadlines generally come down from on high, often with no real developer input. If you are lucky, your manager will be successful in fighting for more time. If you somewhat lucky, the missed deadline will be ignored. If you are unlucky, the deadline will approach and people will suddenly disappear.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I mean the project management triangle comes into play then, and when it comes to SWE, throwing more money at a problem usually doesn't make it go faster. Basically the higher-ups have to decide what is most important; if the deadline is fixed, then the scope HAS TO BE flexible.
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  There's a basic communication problem IME. When I've been in this position (an impossible deadline) it's been because some Sr VP or C-suite type decides that something HAS to be done by a certain date. Like, they want to unveil a new product/feature at CES or some other trade conference so the date is fixed. So this filters down through 3-4 layers of management to you, the dev lead who actually has to build the thing. You take one look at it and it is basically impossible and you can list the 17 reasons why. BUT the problem is that the person that needs to be convinced is the Sr VP/C-suite type. So your analysis has to go back up, filtered through 3-4 layers of managers, each less technical than the last. And of course nobody in that chain wants to disappoint their boss so they hedge/soft-pedal your analysis at every layer. Now the SVP/C-suite type, who typically does in fact have good reasons for wanting this project done by whatever deadline they set originally, only gets a watered-down, possibly incoherent version of you analysis of why the project is impossible by the given deadline. Not surprisingly, they don't find it convincing. tl;dr; everything in a large corporation is a game of telephone where everyone is incentivized to muddle the message. So any deadline/commitment handed through multiple levels of management is really difficult to negotiate. And the more unrealistic it is, the harder it is the negotiate. Nobody wants to tell their boss that the thing they want done in 3 months will actually take 2 years.