I once had an interesting conversation with a director of engineering - he asked for an estimate on how long a project would take given the resources. I gave an

I once had an interesting conversation with a director of engineering - he asked for an estimate on how long a project would take given the resources. I gave an optimistic estimate of 3 months, and expressed that it was optimistic - he was dumbfounded, and told me that the company didn't have that sort of time. I ended up being quite prescient - the project took 3 1/2 months, including a bad crunch near the end of it. Fortunately I was placed in a different team before that crunch, I probably would have quit fast after surviving an insane crunch a few months beforehand where I wrote ~50% of the frontend code due to a series of unfortunate circumstances. Crunch mode makes developers want to quit and distrust managers/executives - it's a breach of trust.