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Comment by nine_zeros | Hacker News Reader

NEVER sacrifice your life for an artificial deadline.

How to determine if something is an artificial deadline? Because if it were a real deadline with significance to the business, they'd pull more hands on deck, remove roadblocks relentlessly day after day, and even offer to take portions of your work on themselves so that the deadlines can be met.

If they are not making such moves, rest assured that the deadline is not critical - but only required for some BS stack ranking, or for the management's own promotion. They WILL fire you after putting all the work if it fits their BS processes.

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The only people who will remember you worked insane hours are your family.

This is amazingly well said! It deserves a huge virtual billboard.

I'd go further and say to never sacrifice your life for any deadline at all. Part of having a work contract specifically means that all risks rests on capital holders shoulders and not yourself.

That is an incredibly succinct way of summarising the way I started to see the world about a decade ago (and more than a decade into my career as a developer).

Me and my employer are in a contract that legally obliges us to pretend we care.

Why legally?

This seems trivially false. The risk that a worker stops being paid because their capital holder no longer has income is always going to be there, and that could be because one or more workers were unable to accomplish one or more tasks necessary for the capital holders to sell a product or service.

Of course, some workers are also capital holders, and should be negotiating appropriate terms such that their mission critical contribution is appropriately rewarded. And no one should be compelled to sacrifice their life without this “appropriate reward”, but exactly what that is is always in flux depending on many parameters.

It's on the capital holders to make sure that the deadlines are reachable and appropriate to the amount of time you actually have working normally, rushing as a worker doesn't make any sense.

Either they miscalculated the number of employees they needed or they just aren't profitable enough to sustain the workload, both cases are failures on the company side.

And sure, if the company is willing to, they can share some of that risk and reward associated with it to the employees

You’re clearly saying this from a position of privilege. A whole lot of “should” not any “this is how it is in reality”.

Sure, I'm opened to some strict law enforcement and heavy fines to make sure the company doesn't step outside their boundaries.

>both cases are failures on the company side.

Who/what/why fails is irrelevant. Anytime you are selling something, including labor, there exists a risk that the buyer stops paying, for myriad reasons. One of those reasons is that the buyer themselves (which could be a business) are not able to sell. Which means that some of the “capital holder’s” risk is inherently a worker’s risk.

The worker usually has no input on that anyways, what can you realistically do if the business model doesn't work?

Just adding more people to a team isn't useful if you don't have the time to integrate them well in a project.

Even then, it might be what you call a "real deadline", doesn't mean you should overwork for months, a couple of days or even some weeks is okay, but you should also be compensated for it.

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