There are three kinds of deadlines:

* the business season (whether holidays or otherwise) - you lose actual bags of money any time it is missed. Alternative versions is "run out of VC money" and "get jumped over by competition" deadlines, those are real

* the "someone decided to promise it to customer" - Missing it over and over might get you to lose a customer but generally after missing one people responsible for setting them make them long enough to have some leeway

* The "gantt chart fitting" deadline - somewhere somewhere plans a thing he had no idea about, just gathered various random estimates and put them in a chart. Then stuff changes, estimates are missed, and somehow the guys at end of the chart had to catch up for guys at start of the chart taking too long. Missing it doesn't matter, it's self inflicted pain by managers to managers.

Majority of deadlines are in third category. Small part is in second. Vanishingly small part is in third. And without pain the system won't learn to not be too "optimistic" with them. And so enabling delivering miscalculated deadlines just makes it worse.

Do not get me wrong, sometimes shit does hit the fan and you burn midnight oil to fix it, but shit hitting the fan often enough all of the walls are brown is management's, not worker problem

> shit hitting the fan often enough all of the walls are brown is management's, not worker problem

Sure, but as a worker how do I actually convince my bosses to hold themselves or each other accountable? Shit flows downhill and I'm close enough to the bottom it lands on me, not my bosses

I'm not speaking in hypotheticals. I've received the "not a team player" speech a number of times in my career for refusing to do continuous overtime

I love building software, I love writing code, but man am I increasingly convinced I'm not cut out for the industry