I am not calling planning meetings useless - we actually do talk about what needs to be done, discuss estimates, ownership, and so on.

But have you ever noticed that in those plannings, towards the deadline, pressure builds, and when we discuss release plans, steps, etc, at some point eng manager asks if we will be ready to release it next week.

And somewhere in the middle of all the conversation noise, you hear your teammates essentially saying: “Sure, it’ll be ready next week to release,assuming we address the issues, performance, and correctness.”

Politically - everyone’s happy. Legally - as always there is fine print - no promises were made.

We’ll release when it’s done.

Everyone leaves the meeting happy.

Then we have followup later that week in the tight engineering circle, talking about unrealistic dates.

We don’t like cutting corners - but we are forced to. Deadlines are draining..

And here’s the thing:

We want to be proud of our work. But things happen - on-calls, reviews, production issues, priority shifts - and all of that skews estimates.

Management hears the estimates, but they’re under pressure from above, so that pressure gets passed straight down to the team.

We don’t want to deliver and then roll back. We don’t want to ship something we are not confident in.

So the uncomfortable questions remain:

Is the deadline really necessary? Can we allow ourselves to miss a cycle and actually deliver quality work? And do we really need all those extra features that complicate the core project in the first place?

…. Side thought, I saw a post about corporate “new year” letters. You know the ones.

Those essensially say: “go recharge during your holiday, so we can drain your energy efficiently for the rest of the year”

Lana, biocell.