> The fact that nobody dies or a regulatory body doesn't fine you straight away, or as you put it, if it's "arbitrary" doesn't mean much. The industry your whole company is in, at some point was also an arbitrary choice by whoever started it. We're humans, pretty much everything we decide to do is arbitrary.
The problem is when you treat deadlines as something very important and absolutely essential to meet, especially when the dates have just been made up, without even having the full picture of what must be developed, way back.
That's how you get crunching and people having to sleep in the office. That's how you get working until 1 AM just to ship something so the system can go into prod on this made up arbitrary date. People who do this sacrifice their own wellbeing and those who don't no longer seem like team players, leading to a culture that's unhealthy or toxic.
This is especially noticeable in the video game industry, where it's become a widespread problem - even by outsourcing to lower paid developers and getting a bigger workforce as the result, the deadlines for game releases are still unreasonable and you ship buggy games (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077) on the backs of delusional young people who work too much and burn themselves out.
In the company I work at there's a rule that if you're caught working nights or weekends you're getting crap over it, you never get rewarded for "something cool you did last sunday" or anything like that, and there's no crunch time.
If you put those conditions in place, are you still against deadlines? Because we've tried not having them, and collectively agreed it's worse. A team that has no deadlines performs worse than a team that sets deadlines for itself. You might've noticed this in your personal life with your own motivation.
For anyone that doesn't want to ignore the fact that humans are way more productive with deadlines than without, the question is what do you do when it looks like you're going to miss the deadline, so that this balance is a healthy one between motivation and doesn't go into overwork. In this mode of operation "meeting the deadline" means cutting scope instead of working more hours. It means pulling another team into the project, it means leadership being OK with cutting scope, etc.
But pretending like we're all intrinsically motivated and deadlines are harmful is papering over the fact that what's harmful is how you deal with failed deadlines, not the fact that you're aiming your work to be completed at a certain date.
The problem is when you treat deadlines as something very important and absolutely essential to meet, especially when the dates have just been made up, without even having the full picture of what must be developed, way back.
That's how you get crunching and people having to sleep in the office. That's how you get working until 1 AM just to ship something so the system can go into prod on this made up arbitrary date. People who do this sacrifice their own wellbeing and those who don't no longer seem like team players, leading to a culture that's unhealthy or toxic.
This is especially noticeable in the video game industry, where it's become a widespread problem - even by outsourcing to lower paid developers and getting a bigger workforce as the result, the deadlines for game releases are still unreasonable and you ship buggy games (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077) on the backs of delusional young people who work too much and burn themselves out.