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> I find this rather surprising, because I would say about 80% of all of the work i’ve ever done didn’t have a hard deadline in the near future. Factually, this is correct. In practice, it often is better to play along with the fantasy that the deadline is real. I once got half-fired from a job because the deadlines were not, in reality, hard. All kinds of things went wrong in the project - from our team's side, from the (internal) customer's side, and from the company's side (outside of both our control). The project was very late. Sometimes I was fairly open about the deadlines not being hard. We all knew that even if I got the work done by the time they wanted it, no one was ready to consume our output for over a week after our releasing it - at various stages in the project - so we were "ahead" by many weeks. By the end of the project, it was clear my manager didn't want me on the team. I got a terrible review that year where I was accused of causing delays. I challenged that notion, and we both agreed that had I done everything by the claimed deadlines, there would not have been any observable difference. The product would not have come out any quicker. Our delays were miniscule compared to the problems on the customer's side. They still refused to change the verbiage on my review. Internally, the department does keep arbitrary metrics, and they want the numbers to be good even if there is no actual observable benefit. Not all jobs are like that, but many are. The one lesson I learned from that job and the one that followed: You can have similar jobs with the same pay, but the further you are from the customer, the more flexible everyone around you becomes. In the crappy job, we were quite far down in the manufacturing flow, and had little power to negotiate timelines. In the second job (same company), we were higher up in the flow, and more of this pressure was on people downstream from us. |