
No, You Won’t Get It Done over the Weekend - astrodev
https://medium.com/better-programming/no-you-wont-get-it-done-over-the-weekend-1cbfc10eee01
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IloveHN84
Try to say that to management. I'm sure most of them will promote this kind of
behaviour instead of "asking for more time".

Time is money and your manager doesn't want to get negative indicators

~~~
guitarbill
I have done, both in the EU and the US. It worked out fine.

People may be scared of management, but hopefully they're reasonable. They're
people, too. Most have some kind of understanding that sacrificing short-term
productivity is counterproductive, both in that tired people make more
mistakes and worse decisions, but also fed up people leave (super expensive
and inconvenient).

Of course, your colleagues matter here. If they fail to set similar boundaries
and expectations, one person isn't going to fix a dysfunctional environment.
That's why it's important to work with professionals, and not people who
devalue themselves and others regularly.

~~~
jiveturkey
great reply to an overly cynical comment.

being able to push back is a luxury (unfortunately) that requires coming from
a position of some power. that means that your colleagues support you, or that
you are in a union.

where the GP is coming from is that mostly, this isn't the case.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
It serves the people in power to learn about delays beforehand - so they can
plan around them - rather than being suprised by said delays at the last
minute.

Some people live in denial. You do nobody any favors by encouraging their
denial. Some people play stupid power and pressure games to ensure their
employees aren't slacking. If you're already not slacking, you do nobody any
favors by playing. Some people are between a rock (your estimates) and a hard
place (their already agreed-upon deadlines). They're best served by a frank
discussion of priorities, so you're hopefully slipping on the tertiary nice-
to-haves, that they might even be able to negotiate away, rather than the core
requirement they promised.

You don't necessairly need power to push back on unrealistic deadlines. What
you might need power for, is to protect your weekends. But there's more forms
of power than you've enumerated.

When there's a pattern of wanting my weekends, it's typically because they're
trying to do too much with too few resources. What are they going to do - make
things even worse, by spending more money to try and attract a replacement -
and get less out of said replacement, until they get up to speed on the
codebase - and maybe not get as much out of said replacement even then, if
they're not quite as good as me at the specific thing I was doing? I'm a
programmer living in a tech hub in the underpaid field of gamedev. I've got
great BATNAs. I've got more options than they do. So do, I suspect, many/most
"Software Developers" mentioned right in the subtitle of the article.

I'll work the occasional weekend once in a blue moon for something actually
critical like a launch day. Management will often signal it's actually
critical with commensurate compensation - time off, bonuses, or overtime pay.
Or by not asking for my weekends in the first place until it's actually
useful.

~~~
jiveturkey
> You don't necessairly need power to push back on unrealistic deadlines.

I'm sorry, but you do.

If the entire rest of your team accepts such nonsense, and you are the only
one pushing back, you will soon find yourself out of a job.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
> If the entire rest of your team accepts such nonsense, and you are the only
> one pushing back, you will soon find yourself out of a job.

If a team keeps accepting such nonsense - and then keeps slipping on the
deadlines as a result (they _were_ unrealistic deadlines after all, right?) -
they lose the trust and confidence of management, ruin marketing plans, and
can find _the entire team_ out of a job if things get dire enough.

And if you're bypassing your manager, making them look foolish, undermining
them in the eyes of their boss - sure, they might fire you individually, in
self defense, before you get them fired. Or if you're being a jerk in how you
push back, because nobody wants to work with a jerk.

But I've been the only one voicing concerns more than once. Sometimes
management is aware the deadlines are unrealistic - treating them as things to
aspire to, rather than hard requirements to meet. Sometimes they didn't
realize how much work they'd signed up for, and were able to negotiate to
change requirements around for that deadline. Sometimes their hands were tied
- but they at least appreciated the heads up, and we were able to get on the
same page about priorities, and cut away as much of the unnecessary fluff as
possible.

There's one occasion where I've probably gone a step too far. A ~50 person all
hands, where we were given the choice of betting everything on a hard deadline
- or taking a safer, less lucrative option. I answered in earnest, that I
didn't think we would be able to hit the deadline. I was the only one to voice
that concern.

I survived the first round of layoffs when my concerns proved right. I
wouldn't have accepted the terms necessary to survive the second round of
layoffs, so I suppose I _did_ "soon" find myself out of a job... as did most
of the rest of the company. Took some time off to relax when that happened...
and when I was done with that, the first company I applied to matched my
asking salary. Clearly I didn't raise it high enough!

