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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I hear this I chuckle.

Say you book a wedding with your fiance and on the week prior ask her if there's any reason behind the wedding date being when it is. And if you dig deeper you'll see no "real life consequences" will happen to either one if you miss it, either, but I'm guessing she walks over missing this "arbitrary date".

The fact that nobody dies or a regulatory body doesn't fine you straight away, or as you put it, if it's "arbitrary" doesn't mean much. The industry your whole company is in, at some point was also an arbitrary choice by whoever started it. We're humans, pretty much everything we decide to do is arbitrary.

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> The fact that nobody dies or a regulatory body doesn't fine you straight away, or as you put it, if it's "arbitrary" doesn't mean much. The industry your whole company is in, at some point was also an arbitrary choice by whoever started it. We're humans, pretty much everything we decide to do is arbitrary.

The problem is when you treat deadlines as something very important and absolutely essential to meet, especially when the dates have just been made up, without even having the full picture of what must be developed, way back.

That's how you get crunching and people having to sleep in the office. That's how you get working until 1 AM just to ship something so the system can go into prod on this made up arbitrary date. People who do this sacrifice their own wellbeing and those who don't no longer seem like team players, leading to a culture that's unhealthy or toxic.

This is especially noticeable in the video game industry, where it's become a widespread problem - even by outsourcing to lower paid developers and getting a bigger workforce as the result, the deadlines for game releases are still unreasonable and you ship buggy games (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077) on the backs of delusional young people who work too much and burn themselves out.

In the company I work at there's a rule that if you're caught working nights or weekends you're getting crap over it, you never get rewarded for "something cool you did last sunday" or anything like that, and there's no crunch time.

If you put those conditions in place, are you still against deadlines? Because we've tried not having them, and collectively agreed it's worse. A team that has no deadlines performs worse than a team that sets deadlines for itself. You might've noticed this in your personal life with your own motivation.

For anyone that doesn't want to ignore the fact that humans are way more productive with deadlines than without, the question is what do you do when it looks like you're going to miss the deadline, so that this balance is a healthy one between motivation and doesn't go into overwork. In this mode of operation "meeting the deadline" means cutting scope instead of working more hours. It means pulling another team into the project, it means leadership being OK with cutting scope, etc.

But pretending like we're all intrinsically motivated and deadlines are harmful is papering over the fact that what's harmful is how you deal with failed deadlines, not the fact that you're aiming your work to be completed at a certain date.

I’m sure you’d usually get very reasonable answers when asking about the rationale behind a set wedding date. For one, engaged couples are probably looking forward to being married, so there’s value in having it as soon as possible. You’ll also probably hear about it being in the right season, the venue being available, enough money saved up, etc.

In a business, a deadline should have valid a business case, one that’s not arbitrary - does it help improve the bottom line, or not? One senior manager thinking he will look good to the C-suite by having it done by a certain time probably doesn’t. Agreeing on a rough date with an external client, who have their own considerations to take into account, probably does.

I don't think the comparison is valid.

The people setting the wedding dates are the fiances, who are the ones organizing it and are also the main recipients. In that case they are both the vendor and customer, it is pretty much like a DIY situation, even if there is some outsourcing involved.

Now I won't say deadlines are bad, but they shouldn't be set and promised without first getting a careful estimation, which is what the parent comment is criticizing.

- deadline set randomly or by gut feeling of a manager = bad (more often than not)

- deadline set after careful estimation of resources involved, their own estimations and possibly the number of side projects that might have to be rescoped/paused for that purpose = good

Also: wedding dates are often set far out in the future. It is never: 2 weeks from now we MUST have the wedding.

Not sure what's your point. Yes, deadlines are arbitrary just as most things are. That most things are doesn't change a thing about correct estimates being practically impossible and deadlines harmful.

That is a very interesting example because in my (Southeast Asia) country & culture, a missed wedding date will have a real & huge financial consequence.

I think a good distinction is what happens after the deadline. The wedding won't keep getting planned after the wedding date. Most software keeps being developed after a deadline. But I guess there's software that is "one shot" as well? Like a visualization software to show/analyze the election results as they progress during election day.

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