[palata]

"When managers imposed fake deadlines on me, I hated it. By experience, I know it sucks. Now that I am on the other side, I choose to forget about my experience and do it anyway".

Sounds like being beaten as a child, promising yourself you will never beat yours, and do it anyway.

It seems easy to me: if you call it "fake", then you should not do it. It's never worth working nights and weekends for something that is fake. As an engineer, you do that to me once, I tell you why it sucks. Do it a second time and I will never trust you again; you have just made our relationship adversarial forever. You're the manager of course, so I can't openly go against you. I can just make your life harder everytime it's possible. Every. Single. Time.

Now in a big organisation, you can agree with the team on internal deadlines. Those are not fake: maybe you want a milestone to present to the rest of the company. Probably it matters: your team needs to show results, everybody understands that. But this is definitely not fake, everybody understands that it is internal, and it is probably more flexible than an external deadline (as in: we won't work nights and weekends if we're late, we'll just postpone it).