How Setting Arbitrary Deadlines Can Hurt Developers

Deadlines are a thing everyone encounters. “We need this app to go live next week” is something you most likely heard before, and generally this scares me.

A deadline on its own isn’t a bad thing — I’d even argue it might be good. Usually, I personally perform better with a deadline in mind, and just having an open-ended project can hurt the project in the long run. The key is to find the right balance and to be realistic about it.

Deadlines have to be there for a reason. Just because is not a good reason. It is a horrible deadline practice and can hurt you or your developers. Luckily, most companies I’ve worked for haven’t had issues with arbitrary deadlines, but some have. And let me illustrate a situation I encountered.

I was working at a startup, the front-end team was 3 people, and the back-end team was an equal size. We were working on a new version of the mobile app and a deadline had been set for when it was supposed to go live. However, this deadline was just thought up by the CEO/CTO and there really was no reasoning behind it.

Well, no reasoning isn’t entirely true, the deadline was set based on an estimate of the developers.

If you are a developer, or frequently work with developers, you should at this stage understand what the problem is.

Estimates are estimates, and usually wildly inaccurate. That is not because the developers are incompetent, but because it is incredibly hard to estimate a full project. There are so many aspects that can completely throw off an estimate that you never could’ve predicted.

Anyways, the prediction of the project was the result of a 2-day meeting, going from a brief of the new features, to dissecting every part thoroughly, and then cutting that up even further. Then every part was estimated, cross-estimated, referenced to UX and UI designs, and then all the hours were counted, a margin was added, and there we had our deadline.

And you might think, having UI and UX design ready and including margin in the estimate should be good enough right? That is already much more than most estimates deal with.