[hn_throwaway_99]

Please introduce me to the fantasy world where everything else can survive without deadlines and schedules.

As an engineer, I don't like deadlines either given how unpredictable large scale software development can be, but the fact of the matter is that most software is in service to a business, and businesses need to run on schedules. If you don't like that, you shouldn't be working in a software business, you should be working in a research think tank or academia.

[linguae]

To add, coming from a research environment (industry AI researcher turned community college professor), there are deadlines in industrial research labs and academia, too. All of my industry research projects had to fit within management-defined schedules. Back in grad school I was well knowledgeable of the “call for papers” deadlines of all the major conferences of my field, and my professors also were well aware of the various deadlines for applying for NSF grants.

I hate project estimation with a passion, especially when doing research, but I recognize that funding isn’t infinite and funders want to assess their own risks. This, we as researchers and engineers have to try our best when it comes to project estimation, even though there are so many “unknowns.”

The only situations that I could think of that are free of deadlines and estimation pressures are projects that are not on the “critical path” of a business or organization, such as a tenured professor working on a project where the outcome doesn’t negatively impact job security, or a student’s side project (like Linux circa 1991) where the only constraint is time.