That's wild. I've always wanted to see what projects managed with all the leadership buying into ToC or Reinertsen's Principles of Product Development Flow would look like.
As an engineer I've experienced dumb deadlines, but I've equally seen wasteful decisions by engineers that are at best resume padding and often legitimately harmful to product and code quality ("let's make this a microservice" lol).
My favorite is when leadership wants something dumb or contrary to reality and engineering teams are happy to build it because they can use fancy technology. Then when the product is delivered late, a little buggy, and users don't actually use it anyway — everyone can shrug, point to someone else as at fault, then rinse and repeat the game. Incentivizing honesty is hard.
After trying to fight very hard against leadership that wanted to build something contrary to reality and burning out I have decided to never fight again. I'll build it, no questions asked, and I'll relish in wrecking the company as I build it. It's the only way for me to stay sane and enjoy this industry anymore.
As an engineer I've experienced dumb deadlines, but I've equally seen wasteful decisions by engineers that are at best resume padding and often legitimately harmful to product and code quality ("let's make this a microservice" lol).
My favorite is when leadership wants something dumb or contrary to reality and engineering teams are happy to build it because they can use fancy technology. Then when the product is delivered late, a little buggy, and users don't actually use it anyway — everyone can shrug, point to someone else as at fault, then rinse and repeat the game. Incentivizing honesty is hard.