I am not completely convinced. The biggest problem is that if you teach "Parkinson's Law is real" to managers, they will have a tendency to set unreasonable dea

I am not completely convinced. The biggest problem is that if you teach "Parkinson's Law is real" to managers, they will have a tendency to set unreasonable deadlines and it will hurt everybody. Of course, saying "we don't really care, we can release in 10 years" is on the other end of the spectrum. The thing is, it's absolutely not true that developers fundamentally don't care about their work being released. If they don't give a shit, I would argue that it's a company problem, not a lack of deadline. Because if you set extreme deadlines and your developers don't give a shit, they will just produce crap to meet the deadline. Management is not about tricking your minions into working more. It's about making sure that your employees do give a shit. All the developers I know (myself included) are happier to provide a good product to clients than to never release anything or release crap. But if you put me in a situation where I don't give a shit anymore, and we end up in an adversarial scenario: I will manipulate my manager to protect myself. I will optimise for my own sanity (it includes keeping my job and not burning out). And I am pretty sure that managers don't like this idea, but I would complete TFA by saying: "manipulating your manager is real, so use it (if necessary)".