Most software “deadlines” are Type II. “QZX needs to be done by Friday” doesn’t mean there’s a real, external deadline. It means, usually, that QZX is not important enough to justify more than a week of a programmer’s time. It’s not an actual deadline but a resource limit. That’s different. Some people enjoy the stress of a legitimate deadline, but no one enjoys an artificial deadline, which exists more to reinforce power relationships and squeeze free extra work out of people than to meet any pressing business need. More savvy people use the latter kind as an excuse to slack: QZX clearly isn’t important enough for them to care if it’s done right, because they won’t budget the time, so slacking will probably be tolerated as long as it’s not egregious. If QZX is so low a concern that the programmer’s only allowed to spend a week of his time on it, then why do it at all? Managers of all stripes seem to think that denying resources and time to a project will encourage those tasked with it to “prove themselves” against adversity (“let’s prove those jerks in management wrong… by working weekends, exceeding expectations and making them a bunch of money”) and work hard to overcome the gap in support and resources between what is given and what is needed. That never happens; not with anyone good, at least. (Clueless 22-year-olds will do it; I did, when I was one. The quality of the code is… suboptimal.) The signal sent by a lack of support and time to do QZX right is: QZX really doesn’t matter. Projects that are genuinelyworth doing don’t have artificial deadlines thrown on them. They only have deadlines if there are real, external deadlines imposed by the outside world, and those are usually objectively legible. They aren’t deadlines that come from managerial opinion “somewhere” but real-world events. It’s marginal, crappy pet projects that no one has faith in that have to be delivered quickly in order to stay alive. For those, it’s best to not deliver them and save energy for things that matter– as far as one can get away with it. Why work hard on something the business doesn’t really care about? What is proved, in doing so?

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