<story><title>Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead</title><url>https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/09/15/deadlines.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sooyoo</author><text>Yes, imagine air travel was run without deadlines.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ve booked a flight on dec 1 at 3pm. You check in, sit at the gate. At 2:40pm you are informed that, sorry, the plane isn&amp;#x27;t actually there yet. It&amp;#x27;s still on route. We&amp;#x27;ll fly at 7pm instead. You sit and wait. At 6:45pm you are informed that the plane is there, but the airport is out of fuel. More fuel will be there tomorrow. Rescheduled for next morning at 8am. You wait. At 7:40am next morning you are informed that the pilots are not awake yet. They had a long day yesterday, then went for some drinks, they just had to sleep in today. Rescheduled to 11am. At 10:30am somebody tells you that, well, things are in place but ATC went to a team building event, all flights grounded, but will be back at 4pm. You finally lift off, 25 hours late.&lt;p&gt;Entirely preventable had a deadline be set and all necessary components be scheduled correctly to meet that deadline.&lt;p&gt;Deadlines serve a purpose beyond coersion. There is misuse, but if you widen your horizon then you may realize that not all of it is.</text></item><item><author>ahaproudowl</author><text>Yes, imagine air travel wasrun like that: &amp;quot;The plane must be ready by December 1st!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Proper safety checks wouldn&amp;#x27;t let the plane leave the ground. Delays in that critical state are inconvenient, but you accept them because the alternative is not acceptable.&lt;p&gt;We should treat software in exactly the same way, It&amp;#x27;s ready when it&amp;#x27;s ready.&lt;p&gt;The issue is the illusion of control. A bad CEO will measure the performance of his CTO by productivity alone. A good CEO will measure the CTO&amp;#x27;s output by consistently increasing quality.</text></item><item><author>arnvald</author><text>Most deadlines in my career so far were arbitrary. Sure, some deadlines were driven by fixed events, for example Christmas promotion has to be launched before Christmas.&lt;p&gt;But in most cases when I asked managers about the reason behind the deadline, the answer was something like &amp;quot;oh,I promised this team&amp;#x2F;director we&amp;#x27;ll do it by then&amp;quot;. When I dug deeper to see what happens if we miss the deadline, it appeared the said team would be just fine, there were no real life consequences, just that they wanted to finish their part of work by certain time, and they depended on us.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying deadlines are useless, but they&amp;#x27;re very often driven by some arbitrary promises made by managers before even consulting developers about the complexity of work to be done.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>It’s always fascinating to read these anti-deadline articles that assume deadlines are arbitrary things that exist for no reason.&lt;p&gt;That might be moderately true for, say, someone developing a new app feature that gets shipped to users who aren’t expecting it. However, it’s not true at all when the software development output is a gating feature for real-world contractual obligations and other such business drivers. In that case, target dates must be carefully forecasted and estimates must be performed with great care and detain. This doesn’t guarantee that a target date will be hit, of course, but it’s not impossible to produce estimates that are reasonable accurate a large percentage of the time.&lt;p&gt;Estimation, planning, and progress tracking are difficult skills that must be learned, but they’re not impossible. I suspect many of the developers who believe that target dates are always arbitrary, pointless, and impossible to estimate have mostly worked in big cash-rich environments where it didn’t really matter when a feature shipped. If you go to the other end of the spectrum and talk to engineers who work in industries where target dates are critical you’ll discover a lot of people who are very good at breaking down projects and accurately estimating dates without relying on crunch time to get things done. It may sound impossible if you’ve never worked in an industry that requires such precision, but it makes sense after you’ve worked in such an environment for a while.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>selcuka</author><text>Obviously the OP is talking about developing and manufacturing a plane, not flying it. Your example is a schedule, not a deadline.</text></comment>
<story><title>Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead</title><url>https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/09/15/deadlines.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sooyoo</author><text>Yes, imagine air travel was run without deadlines.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ve booked a flight on dec 1 at 3pm. You check in, sit at the gate. At 2:40pm you are informed that, sorry, the plane isn&amp;#x27;t actually there yet. It&amp;#x27;s still on route. We&amp;#x27;ll fly at 7pm instead. You sit and wait. At 6:45pm you are informed that the plane is there, but the airport is out of fuel. More fuel will be there tomorrow. Rescheduled for next morning at 8am. You wait. At 7:40am next morning you are informed that the pilots are not awake yet. They had a long day yesterday, then went for some drinks, they just had to sleep in today. Rescheduled to 11am. At 10:30am somebody tells you that, well, things are in place but ATC went to a team building event, all flights grounded, but will be back at 4pm. You finally lift off, 25 hours late.&lt;p&gt;Entirely preventable had a deadline be set and all necessary components be scheduled correctly to meet that deadline.&lt;p&gt;Deadlines serve a purpose beyond coersion. There is misuse, but if you widen your horizon then you may realize that not all of it is.</text></item><item><author>ahaproudowl</author><text>Yes, imagine air travel wasrun like that: &amp;quot;The plane must be ready by December 1st!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Proper safety checks wouldn&amp;#x27;t let the plane leave the ground. Delays in that critical state are inconvenient, but you accept them because the alternative is not acceptable.&lt;p&gt;We should treat software in exactly the same way, It&amp;#x27;s ready when it&amp;#x27;s ready.&lt;p&gt;The issue is the illusion of control. A bad CEO will measure the performance of his CTO by productivity alone. A good CEO will measure the CTO&amp;#x27;s output by consistently increasing quality.</text></item><item><author>arnvald</author><text>Most deadlines in my career so far were arbitrary. Sure, some deadlines were driven by fixed events, for example Christmas promotion has to be launched before Christmas.&lt;p&gt;But in most cases when I asked managers about the reason behind the deadline, the answer was something like &amp;quot;oh,I promised this team&amp;#x2F;director we&amp;#x27;ll do it by then&amp;quot;. When I dug deeper to see what happens if we miss the deadline, it appeared the said team would be just fine, there were no real life consequences, just that they wanted to finish their part of work by certain time, and they depended on us.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying deadlines are useless, but they&amp;#x27;re very often driven by some arbitrary promises made by managers before even consulting developers about the complexity of work to be done.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>It’s always fascinating to read these anti-deadline articles that assume deadlines are arbitrary things that exist for no reason.&lt;p&gt;That might be moderately true for, say, someone developing a new app feature that gets shipped to users who aren’t expecting it. However, it’s not true at all when the software development output is a gating feature for real-world contractual obligations and other such business drivers. In that case, target dates must be carefully forecasted and estimates must be performed with great care and detain. This doesn’t guarantee that a target date will be hit, of course, but it’s not impossible to produce estimates that are reasonable accurate a large percentage of the time.&lt;p&gt;Estimation, planning, and progress tracking are difficult skills that must be learned, but they’re not impossible. I suspect many of the developers who believe that target dates are always arbitrary, pointless, and impossible to estimate have mostly worked in big cash-rich environments where it didn’t really matter when a feature shipped. If you go to the other end of the spectrum and talk to engineers who work in industries where target dates are critical you’ll discover a lot of people who are very good at breaking down projects and accurately estimating dates without relying on crunch time to get things done. It may sound impossible if you’ve never worked in an industry that requires such precision, but it makes sense after you’ve worked in such an environment for a while.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>makeitdouble</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re not describing a &amp;quot;creative&amp;quot; situation where you are building something new.&lt;p&gt;If you had to reexplore and reinvent flight routes every single time, yes deadline in that scenario would also become meaningless as you&amp;#x27;d have no idea what lies ahead each time. It would be the same as setting a deadline on how long Columbus should take to reach India.</text></comment>