[thow-01187]

Furthermore, financial penalties on late delivery are not uncommon in enterprise business-to-business settings. These penalties are sometimes quite steep

If the choice is between releasing kinda-working, but unpolished software, or throwing a developer's monthly labor cost out of the window every single day, these management anti-patterns suddenly make much more sense

[Forge36]

I business agreement isn't an arbitrary date. Those dates should be clearly communicated to engineers.

[danparsonson]

They are communicated to engineers - in the form of deadlines...

[spaetzleesser]

Problem with a lot of deadlines is that you aren’t told if this is a hard requirement because of a contract or some other external factor or just an ego trip or wishful thinking of upper management.

I have seen it plenty of times that management pushed for an arbitrary deadline. The deadline passed, project was not done and nothing bad happened other than another new deadline.