This is gonna be just a short one.

I was seeing a couple of very, very toxic reactions to developers having to demo something they have learnt about on Saturday on the next Monday. The reactions were talking about how "lazy" these people were, and "everything took ages to release" and now somebody finally holding the whip and things will happen on time.

Let's cut the bullshit of inexperienced folks who only saw corporations in comic books or Hollywood.

Impossible deadlines are management failure

Would you live in a skyscraper that was designed, given permission and built in 2 months?

When people are facing impossible deadlines, they freak out, their ability to think in the big picture is being replaced with a severe tunnel vision. They might be going the hardest, longest path... They cannot correct themselves as the tunnel-vision and the urge to produce blinds them.

Impossible deadlines are recipe for a disaster later. The euphemism will be later "unforeseen critical bugs". And for high amount of burn-out and resignation (euphemism: "high turnover associated with high performance situations").

Did Tesla achieve self-driving cars in 3 years? Guess what! They still did not. Let's not celebrate vision when it is detached from reality! 🫣

User volume equals edge-case amount

I cannot express it more:

The more users you have, the more established a software is the more edge-cases you will have.

It's very easy to test on latest Android. When you have millions of users you have to test tons of Android versions, iOS versions, MacOS and Windows versions, tablet formats, etc.

You would have all sorts of names, like two character full names: 李明 or very-very long names: Margarita María de la Victoria Esperanza Jacoba Felicidad Perpetua y Todos los Santos de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias

You would need to operate in all sorts of timezones. And so on.

People are not slow in big corporations because they are morons. They have a lot to break and they need to move carefully.

The professional way of this is layers of QA, gradual rollout, monitoring and before all of that careful UX research and UX design knowing that you are going to deliver value and not just some haphazard gimmick.

Summary

This will be my most personal opinion on this matter, but I think you are a loonie if you are a software developer and you side with this type of management. Mental and physical health, seeing your family and lastly commitment to your users are non-negotiable in my opinion. If you think people are tricking you because they work from home, you have control issues, my friend, you also tell me that you have absolutely no way to measure performance objectively.

Be considerate, be professional, understand the complexity of world and stop celebrating scammers promising false shortcuts to greatness.