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Comment by markhnthoraway | Hacker News Reader

> The React site would be functional and performant in 6 weeks, and ship in 10. If it didn't, I would step down and recruit a replacement.

I lost at lot of faith in the author's judgment at this point. I know this thing worked out and it was the right decision to port things over to React (and correct the bad decision to count on the Angular team to deliver SSR on their timelines). But you need to be able to explain things to the business without this sort of nonsense. I would be really concerned if I heard a manager saying something like that. It's not an argument, it's just a "trust me" that raises the stakes and pressure around the project.

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That part worried me, too. The inherited situation was not good, but I think it may have set the stage for some reactionary heroics that were also somewhat unhealthy.

Jumping from one extreme (completely broken development process) to another (threatening to voluntarily resign if arbitrary deadlines aren’t hit) just feels like a sequence of unhealthy extremes driven more by ideology than practicality.

It’s great that the process worked out, but I’d not be happy to work under either team to be honest. Plenty of teams manage to ship working code without either of these problems.

> Plenty of teams manage to ship working code without either of these problems.

The key point is that the team in this story didn’t. They needed something extreme to make progress.

And remember that nearly all deadlines are arbitrary. Somebody needs to pick some date to see if something gets done by that date. There’s nothing wrong with an “arbitrary” deadline like the one described in the article.

I don’t agree at all that they needed the extreme behavior to make progress. They did need to bail on their bad plan and implement a better one.

> Somebody needs to pick some date to see if something gets done by that date.

Right. What you don’t need to do is say “I am going to hold my team to the arbitrary date I ballparked because I staked my reputation on hitting it no matter what”. That’s a miserable way to work.

I clicked into the author's profile and it says "Osaka, Japan" -- if that's the working environment, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the only approach that made sense given the intense work culture in Japan (from what I've heard)

I think you're taking things without knowing the details of his context. You speak to business in the language business understands. Sometimes business is not interested in your logical explanations. They're seen as excuses. Business dumps the responsibilities on your lap, gives you a budget, and starts pressuring you to deliver. The only conversations you then have are about time and money. Give me some time, give me some money, I'll save you more, etc. So those are the bottom lines of any arguments. Maybe in his specific case this (second) argument, of putting his job on the line to buy himself 10 weeks of work, combined with the first (staying aware of how the angular project is evolving and picking whichever comes first) was something that business felt comfortable risking. You would go in with all your React technobabble and be surprised when they roll their eyes and say "how long, how much".

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