> "You don't have to work a lot of hours, but some people choose to." You want to impress your boss. Hell, you want to impress yourself. So you go die-hard to m

> "You don't have to work a lot of hours, but some people choose to." You want to impress your boss. Hell, you want to impress yourself. So you go die-hard to meet an impossible deadline. You delivered the project on time, with all the extra features you wanted. You are the hero. High fives all around. And if you're lucky, you'll get that bonus. This makes me cringe. If you're a developer, it's your manager's job to assign tasks which can be completed on a reasonable schedule, and to adjust stakeholder expectations if they don't turn out to be achievable on time. If you're facing an impossible deadline, that means that your boss hasn't done their job. It's not your responsibility to dig them out. And if you do pull through and somehow finish on time, all you've conveyed to your manager is that the status quo is working. You've demonstrated that they can move up deadlines in order to get more work out of you without paying you for it. If your team is understaffed, they can save money by leaving it understaffed. Soft deadlines (the boss has a meeting on Thursday and it would be a feather in their cap to have a feature working by then) turn into hard deadlines when they learn that developers don't push back.