Thoughts

When managers obsess over deadlines instead of quality, guess what? Developers will too. The result is predictable: corners get cut, quality drops, and everyone pretends it’s fine.

Here’s how developers “make” deadlines:

• Copy/pasting
• Cutting corners
• Shipping known issues
• Skipping reviews and tests
• Ignoring performance, security, accessibility, readability, and maintainability

The kicker? Management often has no idea. Everyone’s so focused on “making the date” they forget to ask whether it’s even worth it.

The fix is simple but rarely practiced: talk to each other like adults.

“To hit this deadline, we’ll need to cut these corners. Is that tradeoff worth it?” It’s amazing how often the answer is “actually, no.”

Skip the sprints.

Sprints are like that friend who shows up unannounced every two weeks demanding you justify your existence. They create artificial pressure, estimation games, and make everyone think in two-week increments instead of what actually matters.

Try this instead:

1. Break work into small, independently testable tasks.
2. Track how many tasks get done each week — that’s your velocity.

It’s that simple. And it works because:

• Small tasks mean less risk when things go wrong
• Small tasks keep the momentum going
• Small tasks let multiple people work without stepping on toes
• Small tasks make code reviews actually bearable