“If you have people who aren't technical and they say, well, we need this for Christmas… They don't think that they're saying, could you just do a really kind of slipshod job? … They sort of think they're saying something like, could you just type really fast? The quality will still be the same, but you just have entered it much quicker.”
Maintainable · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Context
Stringer, a longtime software project manager, says he used to fight deadlines and now treats them like gravity. The job is to get as much value out of a deadline as possible while doing as little damage as possible, and that starts with explaining what a rushed date actually asks for.
Transcript
…Because we tried to do it for Christmas or we tried to do it overnight or etc. So that's a kind of organizational mismatch between what can actually be done in a particular time, for example, and what is quick and easy to do versus what would be maintainable in the actual software that's written.
…in the sense like there's like these peak periods where everybody's hunkered down, focused on some initiatives or this is, we got to get things ready before this big conference we go to every year. There's these like little things that like cultural ceremonies in a way that organizations have.
…damage as possible at the same time. And this is something that kind of I find absolutely astounding is that if you have people who aren't technical and they say, well, we need this for Christmas, and that's clearly ambitious in Inverted Commerce as a deadline. They don't think that they're saying, could you just do a really kind of slipshod job? They don't think that's what they're saying. They sort of think they're saying something like, could you just type really fast? The quality will still be the same, but you just have entered it much quicker. And that is something that, I mean, sometimes that, you know, you can explain and say, like, you know, by stating it in this way, that you've just asked for something that will be of poor quality and we need to go back and fix it later. But also the other thing is, like, you know, I think a lot of developers just won't do that. They won't do the thing that is the quick and slipshod way of doing…
Do you think that when those conversations do or do not happen where there's like someone setting a milestone or a deadline, okay, we get this done before Christmas break, what have you? And the developers are like, all right, well, in order for us to do this, we're going to have to make some…
I mean, obviously that happens all the time. And that kind of that conversation doesn't work very well. I think kind of one of the things that I'm kind of working, trying to work towards when I'm kind of working on projects is to start. I mean, one of the phrases I have for this is like, you know…
That's a great one.
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