What I see - and have seen since I started doing this 30+ years ago - is that the date is _always_ …

I love that LLMs are already copying humans when it comes to estimates. When asked for estimate they provide a very padded estimate of weeks. Then they proceed to implement the solution in 30”.

IMO (also 30 years in the biz), it's rarely the date, that's #2. it's the budget. They'll forgive you if you're slightly late, they'll hate you forever if you ask for more money. Agile works really well if you have a good product owner that has secured appropriate budget for the level of uncertainty in the endeavor & can make decisions and not be overridden by extrinsic forces. Everything else is negotiable.

> the date is _always_ more important than the actual deliverable. Always. Hah! You just gave me an idea for a new methodology. Date-bound delivery. - The business tells you what they want, as they do - The business tells you when they want it, as they do - The team does not say how long it will take. Instead, they say what they think they can deliver in the time allotted. - As the date nears, more edge features get trimmed - As the date arrives, something is always ready to deliver, no matter how miniscule Such a methodology would ensure delivery, but not necessarily the contents of that delivery. Post mortems would no longer discuss why something took so long, and instead would focus on why features were cut. If, as you say, the date is always more important, wouldn't such a methodology be worth trying?

The natural extension to Spolsky’s quote is: Unless someone else is paying for the jeans. I think the smaller the organization, the more likely that a software projects has real stakeholders. In bigger, more mature organizations, the experienced players have arranged their affairs so that their career progress doesn’t depend on delivery of software: Late, early, or ever. For instance I work on the “hardware” side of technology development, and I tailor my annual performance review goals so that a deliverable is satisfied when I can demo it with code that I’ve written myself.