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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

> projects are always late

This is the root of all evil. The artificially created deadlines that make something that can be resolved next week "urgently today" just to increase your adrenaline levels so you work 30 mins more today is what causes a lot of software to end up being a piece of shit.

Software is about deep thinking, and comprehensive understanding. Yes, it's all about trade offs, but there is a point where things can't be any faster.

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I think you are missing something: wanted features always exceeds time. You need some form of deadline to force your to think about what features to cut. Nobody wants to cut any feature that could make it in until forced to and so you are always late.

The deadlines are artificial, but once they exist they force a lot of real scheduling on many others and so they become real. In theory you can change them, but in practice people are depending on you.

Nothing is wrong with what you said, but keep it in context of the above.

GP here, I don't disagree with you, engineering is all about trade-offs and you can't engineer things to perfection by taking months to solve easy problems. You need progress, and efficiency so sometimes less important problems need to be fixed with less than ideal hacks etc. I agree with this, but having a culture of "everything is due yesterday", "if it can be done in 6 months, tell customer it'll be ready in 2 months" etc just to create stress and increase productivity lowers the engineering quality exponentially more than it increases productivity and expediency.

I agree on one level, but I also know that I'm a person who needs to have some kind of external incentive or else I'll just mire myself in endless rewriting and refactoring; unclear whether that has to be a boss/customer wielding a deadline or if it's enough to have a colleague who leans slightly more to the other end of the practical-idealistic continuum, but I know my best work happens with at least some kind of pressure being applied.

I was recently diagnosed with ADD, and learning that about myself explained a behavior of mine which seems diametrically opposed to yours - the pressure of a deadline makes me panic, and somehow my outlet is bikeshedding.

Give me daily and weekly commitments, and I'll do my most focused and highest quality work.

Yes, this is precisely why I don't like sprints.

Scrumban is less stressful.

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