And please don’t get me wrong

It depends on commercial pressure and on how overtime is compensated. Early in my career our main customer put huge pressure on the company to fix bugs ASAP and we had to work 2 weeks flat out with overtime late every night plus over the weekend. We managed to satisfy the customer AND I doubled my salary that month. If it is a rare event then I have no issue with that. This has no negative effect on morale (it can even be a boost and improve team spirit), and in fact would be happy to get the opportunity. It also helped that we had a good leader: our Director could not help on the debugging but made a point to stay with us and took charge of making sure we were kept well fed, paid for by the company, of course. Leadership and compensation are key.

Some things may be urgent but most deadlines are bogus and created by sales and managers promising something to someone. And everything revolves around that, creating a toxic blame culture. Looking at you Scrum!

> Project gets out tomorrow versus a month from now? Will anyone still care two years from now? No? Wasn’t worth it. Depends on the industry and the circumstances. If this is a company shipping their own software product and the deadlines are arbitrary, then of course they should be a little flexible. But other software development is part of something bigger and/or accountable to third parties who are depending on it. If your software product must be ready for a scheduled run of a hardware build, a launch event that was planned months in advance, a date agreed upon with customers in a contract, or any other circumstance with real dependencies then getting it done on time is crucial. > The human propensity for screaming “I want it now!” about things that don’t really matter never fails to frustrate me. In my experience, people who have only worked in the first kind of environment (deadli…

Yeah, I think "If we don't complete by XX we will be in breach of Regulation YY and will have to admit this to the SEC" is probably worth a bit of extra effort. "This milestone will go Red on my RAG report and make me look bad to my manager" - less so. But like anything else, hopefully there is give and take. "If you finish this version on time to help me out, we'll put half the story points in the next iteration so you can leave at 5/pay down tech debt/whatever."

It will never be "once a year" once you do it once. Once you start doing it, mandatory overtime will become a tool for making deadlines.

> Project gets out tomorrow versus a month from now? Will anyone still care two years from now? No? Wasn’t worth it. 1. TurboTax 2. A game or other software that needs to get out before Christmas 3. A dependency is being shut down ( https://www.honeycode.aws/ )

I'm dealing with another common version of this right now. Another contractor (not from my company) had estimated a certain amount of time to fix everything and add some updates to code they had developed. Our mutual client didn't want to renew with them so asked if we could do it. But lo and behold, the deadline was two days from now so the sooner the better. I cut down the estimate by half but said it wouldn't include fixing anything since presumably they were living with existing bugs in production they could keep living with them if the new features were the priority. I did say that we would have to pay the piper eventually and that this rushed timeline would mean we would miss things and that it was only possible if we had everything in place to do the development work. Things like access, correct data, properly setup environment etc. Of course we started development and had none of…

This depends. SaaS software with a sales window you need to make is way different than random software that doesn’t really need to go out at a certain time. Certain industries may have a few month sales window, and missing it could cost many millions against competition.