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What if I told you it's incredibly risky to rely on a miracle in the last 2 weeks, and it would be much better to properly manage the project and have it comple

What if I told you it's incredibly risky to rely on a miracle in the last 2 weeks, and it would be much better to properly manage the project and have it completed in plenty of time, rather than being inefficient in the early part of a project and making up for it when the pressure of a deadline forces you to face reality?

WalterSear 13y ago
This is fine and good, but not very useful advice to people who find themselves of looking for a miracle in the last 2 weeks.
- justin_vanw 13y ago
  There is no good advice for someone in that situation. The best advice for someone in that situation is to not get into it next time, if there is a next time, because you are totally fucked up and down and sideways right now. Now, if you are obsessed with death marches to the point of replying to every comment on this thread, like thenomad, my advice is stop spending all day hitting reload and waiting for someone to post on hackernews so you can jump in and defend death marches, and go read a book on project management or study or work or do anything besides procrastinating, which is probably the root cause of why you end up in that situation all the time. Learn to do work when there isn't a gun to your head.
  - thenomad 13y ago
    Not sure there's really any need for the ad-hominem, is there? I'm replying to comments on this thread because I'm the author of the original post, and it's polite to respond to people commenting on your work :) I suspect that we largely agree on the subject of death marches and their advisability, actually. Certainly, I'd say that as soon as you're doing death march hours for longer than about 3 weeks, or more frequently than about once a year, that's a Very Bad Idea.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    Sometimes you are assigned to a death march by management. Not everyone lives in a place where there are 10 employers waiting to immediately hire you if you quit on the spot. You need to figure out how to live with the death march and be supportive of your teammates while finding greener pastures.
    - greenyoda 13y ago
      Although if you only work 60 hours a week instead of 80, your boss is not likely to fire you in the middle of a death march, since you'd still be more productive than anyone he could replace you with. (There's no spare time to bring new employees up to speed when you're doing a death march.) Besides, working only 60 hours might make you more productive than all the people who are working 80 hours (better focus, fewer mistakes).
thenomad 13y ago
I'm not sure how "work harder than usual in the run-up to a launch" == "rely on a miracle". I suspect we may be used to sufficiently different industries that we're speaking at cross purposes, though.
mseebach 13y ago
The world is more complex than that. Sometimes there is a hard deadline (those do exist for a large number of completely legitimate reasons) and even though the "must have"s are done and dusted, you know you won't have the opportunity to launch/go to print/present again for a good while, so you cram to really, really make the product shine and impress (any mildly intelligent and creative person who enjoys what they're doing will never run out of ideas for improvements, big and small, no matter how well a project is managed). Sometimes an opportunity comes out of left field - "prestigious conference X just had a cancellation, so we got a slot to demo not-quite-there-yet feature Y. Do we cram to build it, or do we pass on the slot?". Of course, as mentioned, you can't have this becoming the norm, and it might not be for all temperaments to work in a company where it might happen - but it's not in an of itself a bad thing.

WalterSear 13y ago

This is fine and good, but not very useful advice to people who find themselves of looking for a miracle in the last 2 weeks.

justin_vanw 13y ago
There is no good advice for someone in that situation. The best advice for someone in that situation is to not get into it next time, if there is a next time, because you are totally fucked up and down and sideways right now. Now, if you are obsessed with death marches to the point of replying to every comment on this thread, like thenomad, my advice is stop spending all day hitting reload and waiting for someone to post on hackernews so you can jump in and defend death marches, and go read a book on project management or study or work or do anything besides procrastinating, which is probably the root cause of why you end up in that situation all the time. Learn to do work when there isn't a gun to your head.
- thenomad 13y ago
  Not sure there's really any need for the ad-hominem, is there? I'm replying to comments on this thread because I'm the author of the original post, and it's polite to respond to people commenting on your work :) I suspect that we largely agree on the subject of death marches and their advisability, actually. Certainly, I'd say that as soon as you're doing death march hours for longer than about 3 weeks, or more frequently than about once a year, that's a Very Bad Idea.
- danielweber 13y ago
  Sometimes you are assigned to a death march by management. Not everyone lives in a place where there are 10 employers waiting to immediately hire you if you quit on the spot. You need to figure out how to live with the death march and be supportive of your teammates while finding greener pastures.
  - greenyoda 13y ago
    Although if you only work 60 hours a week instead of 80, your boss is not likely to fire you in the middle of a death march, since you'd still be more productive than anyone he could replace you with. (There's no spare time to bring new employees up to speed when you're doing a death march.) Besides, working only 60 hours might make you more productive than all the people who are working 80 hours (better focus, fewer mistakes).

thenomad 13y ago

I'm not sure how "work harder than usual in the run-up to a launch" == "rely on a miracle". I suspect we may be used to sufficiently different industries that we're speaking at cross purposes, though.

mseebach 13y ago

The world is more complex than that. Sometimes there is a hard deadline (those do exist for a large number of completely legitimate reasons) and even though the "must have"s are done and dusted, you know you won't have the opportunity to launch/go to print/present again for a good while, so you cram to really, really make the product shine and impress (any mildly intelligent and creative person who enjoys what they're doing will never run out of ideas for improvements, big and small, no matter how well a project is managed). Sometimes an opportunity comes out of left field - "prestigious conference X just had a cancellation, so we got a slot to demo not-quite-there-yet feature Y. Do we cram to build it, or do we pass on the slot?". Of course, as mentioned, you can't have this becoming the norm, and it might not be for all temperaments to work in a company where it might happen - but it's not in an of itself a bad thing.