'Must be willing to work under pressure' is a warning sign

Itamar Turner-Trauring on December 03, 2018

As a programmer looking for a job, you need to be on the lookout for badly managed companies. Whether it’s malicious exploitation or just plain i... [Read Full]
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Can't agree more!

I think that deadlines aren't' necessary and usually could be substituted with better management and alignment of the team. They do more harm than good. As the effect of the pressure shows after a while, it allows managers to demonstrate good results to the bosses and then accuse developers of bad work when the burnout kicks in.

I had a chance to work in a company that was praising aggressive deadlines. Once they were working on a feature that depended on the start of the year. They had just two months before it starts, so everyone was stressed out and working long hours and on weekends. The team made it in time so CEO was praising the team and labeled them as the reference that everybody should look up to. The feature turned out to be buggy, so the team had to work even harder in the following weeks. As a result, many people left the team and then the company. That whole situation would be avoided if the management told the team to start working on the feature long before the end of the year.


Sure, some deadlines might be unnecessary but to say that for everything seems like a gross over generalization.


I could be wrong for sure!

However, I'd like to play a mental game and find an alternative approach to a mandatory deadline if you can provide an example.

Sure, let's say I'm hiring someone to come do some renovations on my kitchen. How do you propose that should work?


Sadly, I’ve never actually encountered such an ad in the real world.

I would consider joining a company like that, because as you say, they've taken the step to admit the issues to themselves, instead of burning out employees and use turnover to hope to fix all the things :D

Great post!


I built an application in 3-months when I didn't have access to all three integral APIs. I had to fake API call and build the application. I worked an extra hour, at least, nearly every day and weekends at times. When it was released it was found that my testing methodology was producing correct results, but with production data, it would break.

I was obviously blamed for it even though I said at every step of the way that I didn't have sufficient time.

To this day after several bug fixes and passes, there are still inadequacies in the process I couldn't fix.

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