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Deadlines aren't for tech teams. Their for anal upper management more concerned with quarterly financials than deliverables and stake holders who fundamentally

Deadlines aren't for tech teams. Their for anal upper management more concerned with quarterly financials than deliverables and stake holders who fundamentally do not understand how tech works. When someone asks for a deadline, the answer should be "it gets done when it gets done." But if you are a technical who is being asked, the correct answer is the real estimated timeline + at least 2 weeks, depending on complexity. Wasn't agile created to solve this BS? Why is this still even a discussion? I have got better things to do than waste time answering stupid questions form stupid managers.

ubermonkey 2y ago
>Deadlines aren't for tech teams. Uh, that's just wrong. You may have contractual deadlines for delivery that are real and meaningful, for example. >When someone asks for a deadline, the answer should be "it gets done when it gets done." A refusal to engage in meaningful discussions about forecasts does not free you from the obligation to meet one. You must might not like the one you get imposed on you if you refuse.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Please introduce me to the fantasy world where everything else can survive without deadlines and schedules. As an engineer, I don't like deadlines either given how unpredictable large scale software development can be, but the fact of the matter is that most software is in service to a business, and businesses need to run on schedules. If you don't like that, you shouldn't be working in a software business, you should be working in a research think tank or academia.
- linguae 2y ago
  To add, coming from a research environment (industry AI researcher turned community college professor), there are deadlines in industrial research labs and academia, too. All of my industry research projects had to fit within management-defined schedules. Back in grad school I was well knowledgeable of the “call for papers” deadlines of all the major conferences of my field, and my professors also were well aware of the various deadlines for applying for NSF grants. I hate project estimation with a passion, especially when doing research, but I recognize that funding isn’t infinite and funders want to assess their own risks. This, we as researchers and engineers have to try our best when it comes to project estimation, even though there are so many “unknowns.” The only situations that I could think of that are free of deadlines and estimation pressures are projects that are not on the “critical path” of a business or organization, such as a tenured professor working on a project where the outcome doesn’t negatively impact job security, or a student’s side project (like Linux circa 1991) where the only constraint is time.
Hasu 2y ago
This makes no sense at all. The business needs to make money to pay you. Your time is the development cost of the software. It is completely reasonable and rational for a company to say, "This is valuable to us if it can be built in three weeks, but if it takes longer, we don't want it." Because three weeks of paying your team costs a certain amount of money, and a cost higher than that puts the value of the work underwater. If you cannot forecast whether it can be built in three weeks and then deliver against that forecast, you aren't doing your job. > Wasn't agile created to solve this BS? Agile sets regular deadlines for shipping to customers, that is literally the core idea. Instead of one big deadline 6 months from now, you have a small deadline every two weeks for the next 6 months. It's still a deadline.
- Spivak 2y ago
  I think the person you replied to would consider your description of agile to be === "it gets done when it gets done." Despite the term "deadline" used to describe "expected completion date" in agile they're not actually deadlines--you don't throw the work away because it's useless if it's not completed in time.
- agentultra 2y ago
  You want milestones and progress over estimates and deadlines. The value equation of a software development team isn't a product of their time and salary compared to the code/features/whatever-unit they produce. It's the theories and knowledge they build in their heads and share through the process of understanding problems and developing solutions. You can't optimize that process in a Taylorist fashion. If there is a process called Agile that's still useful, it's built on this manifesto that eschews management in the Taylorist sense. The principles are built on a preference for organizations driven by the workers rather than the managers. It was perhaps too radical and too naive. "It gets done when it gets done," is a glib way of saying that progress is more important than deadlines. The idea that systems take time and what's important is that people know where we're at and where we're heading more than threatening punishment for not delivering what we estimated at an agreed upon time.
  - Hasu 2y ago

ubermonkey 2y ago

>Deadlines aren't for tech teams. Uh, that's just wrong. You may have contractual deadlines for delivery that are real and meaningful, for example. >When someone asks for a deadline, the answer should be "it gets done when it gets done." A refusal to engage in meaningful discussions about forecasts does not free you from the obligation to meet one. You must might not like the one you get imposed on you if you refuse.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

Please introduce me to the fantasy world where everything else can survive without deadlines and schedules. As an engineer, I don't like deadlines either given how unpredictable large scale software development can be, but the fact of the matter is that most software is in service to a business, and businesses need to run on schedules. If you don't like that, you shouldn't be working in a software business, you should be working in a research think tank or academia.

linguae 2y ago
To add, coming from a research environment (industry AI researcher turned community college professor), there are deadlines in industrial research labs and academia, too. All of my industry research projects had to fit within management-defined schedules. Back in grad school I was well knowledgeable of the “call for papers” deadlines of all the major conferences of my field, and my professors also were well aware of the various deadlines for applying for NSF grants. I hate project estimation with a passion, especially when doing research, but I recognize that funding isn’t infinite and funders want to assess their own risks. This, we as researchers and engineers have to try our best when it comes to project estimation, even though there are so many “unknowns.” The only situations that I could think of that are free of deadlines and estimation pressures are projects that are not on the “critical path” of a business or organization, such as a tenured professor working on a project where the outcome doesn’t negatively impact job security, or a student’s side project (like Linux circa 1991) where the only constraint is time.

Hasu 2y ago

This makes no sense at all. The business needs to make money to pay you. Your time is the development cost of the software. It is completely reasonable and rational for a company to say, "This is valuable to us if it can be built in three weeks, but if it takes longer, we don't want it." Because three weeks of paying your team costs a certain amount of money, and a cost higher than that puts the value of the work underwater. If you cannot forecast whether it can be built in three weeks and then deliver against that forecast, you aren't doing your job. > Wasn't agile created to solve this BS? Agile sets regular deadlines for shipping to customers, that is literally the core idea. Instead of one big deadline 6 months from now, you have a small deadline every two weeks for the next 6 months. It's still a deadline.

Spivak 2y ago
I think the person you replied to would consider your description of agile to be === "it gets done when it gets done." Despite the term "deadline" used to describe "expected completion date" in agile they're not actually deadlines--you don't throw the work away because it's useless if it's not completed in time.
agentultra 2y ago
You want milestones and progress over estimates and deadlines. The value equation of a software development team isn't a product of their time and salary compared to the code/features/whatever-unit they produce. It's the theories and knowledge they build in their heads and share through the process of understanding problems and developing solutions. You can't optimize that process in a Taylorist fashion. If there is a process called Agile that's still useful, it's built on this manifesto that eschews management in the Taylorist sense. The principles are built on a preference for organizations driven by the workers rather than the managers. It was perhaps too radical and too naive. "It gets done when it gets done," is a glib way of saying that progress is more important than deadlines. The idea that systems take time and what's important is that people know where we're at and where we're heading more than threatening punishment for not delivering what we estimated at an agreed upon time.
- Hasu 2y ago