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Comment by mothsonasloth | Hacker News Reader

When I was a junior dev I used to lie and say the work was going fine, the stories were well estimated and that it would be done on time.

Now as a senior I just say it how it is, maybe occasionally embelish a piece of work if its not well described or estimated.

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But since you've established and proven your place in the workspace, you can get away with it; if you're a freshly hired junior that has to admit they're running behind (in their own estimation), they could risk their job or a bad review in a less mature work environment (that is, one where people are replaceable resources).

As a very senior developer by some measures, I always put a strong emphasis on what's not going well. What's broken can be fixed, as long as it's known. I also believe that it's better to undercommit than overcommit. The delta between committing to and then achieving X+Y vs. committing to and then achieving X alone is fairly small compared to the other alternatives. Commit to X and achieve X+Y? Big positive reaction. Commit to X+Y and achieve only X? Even bigger negative reaction. Why put yourself in a neutral/negative space when you can put yourself in a neutral/positive one? It kind of feels like sandbagging, but I've seen it work well for all concerned too many times to do otherwise.

This reminds me of one of the major causes of famine in Maoist China. A pressure to conform with top-down expectations ("is it getting done?") at the expense of reality ("yes it is"). Often we lie just to make others happy, but then sometimes reality catches up

There's an anecdote that it's possible Saddam believed he actually had WMDs, because the penalty for his subordinates saying they haven't gotten the R&D/production done was death.

Because you have credibility, while a junior want to reassure.

This is a very good point, though I'd advise any junior developer to start to say "I don't know" as quickly as you're able to. From my experience under promising and over delivering has been a far, far better modus operandi than the opposite.

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