[paulcole]

> Plenty of teams manage to ship working code without either of these problems.

The key point is that the team in this story didn’t. They needed something extreme to make progress.

And remember that nearly all deadlines are arbitrary. Somebody needs to pick some date to see if something gets done by that date. There’s nothing wrong with an “arbitrary” deadline like the one described in the article.

[hnthrowaway121]

I don’t agree at all that they needed the extreme behavior to make progress. They did need to bail on their bad plan and implement a better one.

> Somebody needs to pick some date to see if something gets done by that date.

Right. What you don’t need to do is say “I am going to hold my team to the arbitrary date I ballparked because I staked my reputation on hitting it no matter what”. That’s a miserable way to work.