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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Some high-up executive says "We have to be in X market by Y date!" Everyone kills themselves to make the date. At the end, the product owner has to tell Executive that it looks like we won't make the date, no matter what we do. Executive says, "Oh, don't worry about it then, we just won't be first to market."

A year later, a different team is tasked with replacing a legacy system with a new one. The team asks the Executive when the legacy system needs to be replaced. "Oh, well the legacy system still works, so we don't have a hard date. But it should be soon." Four years later, the team is still working on replacing the legacy system. The Executive comes to them and says, "Looks like we won't be using that system anymore, so we can sunset the replacement."

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> Some high-up executive says "We have to be in X market by Y date!" Everyone kills themselves to make the date. At the end, the product owner has to tell Executive that it looks like we won't make the date, no matter what we do. Executive says, "Oh, don't worry about it then, we just won't be first to market."

I'm not sure how many execs would be totally chill with not being first to market if they could have been, but I have seen "Oh, that's actually okay, we been saying March knowing it'd really be September. So you have more time, but it really has to be September"

And then the exec pats themselves on the back for their smart planning, while the engineers regret all the corners that they wouldn't have cut if they'd known they had more time.

True - but you're forgetting the executives previously learned experience of telling a team that a due date was September and them delivering six months later. The consequence was missing the marketing/PR window, negatively impacting the future valuation of the company, reducing sales and leading the board to fire the executive.

... most people aren't arbitrary, they have different experiences or perspectives which leads them to 'rational' decisions.

> A year later, a different team is tasked with replacing a legacy system with a new one. The team asks the Executive when the legacy system needs to be replaced. "Oh, well the legacy system still works, so we don't have a hard date. But it should be soon." Four years later, the team is still working on replacing the legacy system. The Executive comes to them and says, "Looks like we won't be using that system anymore, so we can sunset the replacement."

I'm struggling to see what's supposed to be wrong with this.

I would say what's wrong with it is it was a waste of money/time to be working on the replacement at all, it turns out they didn't need it and did fine without it until it wasn't needed anymore. So the problem isn't that they should have finished it sooner, it's that in fact they shouldn't have been working on it at all, but spent four years working on something useless.

so that's the problem... what the solution is and if it has anything to do with due dates, I don't know!

I guess it might seem like a problem if you are the director of software. If you're an engineer then that was four years of solid pay and benefits, probably with a bonus to boot.

From the perspective of an engineer who cares about nothing but getting paid, the whole discussion in the OP is irrelevant, no? the whole thing is about somebody else's problems irrelevant to you, you'll get paid and probably not fired with or without irrelevant due dates.

Or it tears your ego apart because you are a young developer that has never shipped anything. Reminds me of my first job.

> it was a waste of money/time to be working on the replacement at all, it turns out they didn't need it and did fine without it until it wasn't needed anymore

But that wasn't known. They expected to need it, and when circumstances changed, they canceled the project. It seems to have been a huge project; "don't start work on the project until you need it to be finished" was never going to work.

You can't judge people by what they should have done if they'd had perfect knowledge of the future. If anyone involved had had perfect knowledge of the future, they wouldn't have been working for the company anyway.

Who said anything about judging people?

You did, when you described something as "wrong".

I did, before you, when I did the same thing, but it's not like you disagreed with the premise.

I think there's something wrong with it in the sense that it would be preferable to do differently and worth thinking about if there's a way to do better. I don't associate that with judging anyone.

> "Oh, don't worry about it then, we just won't be first to market."

Supposedly there's a thing called "first-mover advantage". Making the deadline would get them $XXX, and missing it only gets $XX but is still worth doing.

There's a way to map an additional X% chance of making the deadline to being worth some dollar amount of extra effort. Ideally done with full knowledge that it is somewhat of a gamble, and that the dev team don't need to catch any frustration if it doesn't work out.

> "Looks like we won't be using that system anymore, so we can sunset the replacement."

Makes sense to be. Replacing the system would have benefits worth an estimated $X/year, but it takes long enough that the world changed under you and it no longer matters.

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