zlacker

>>vimes6+(OP)
Alternate view point - driving projects to a specific deadline allows the other departments in the company to coordinate marketing, packaging, and selling the product. These people don't sit on their hands patiently waiting for engineers to finish building, their work can take many months just as the development does, and sometimes also involves making tradeoffs to deliver on time. No company wants to wait another year after development is finished before they start earning money for it.

>>danpar+V7
You have to try to understand that building software is not like baking a cake in a custom shape. Which if you have seen those shows it requires a certain amount of ingenuity to create a cake shaped like a fountain. Or whatever.

But fundamentally software development has 1000 to 1000000 more moving pieces than a cake, generally a research project, like building a new type of aircraft engine. Except, imagine it was a really new type of engine that was being built based on an alien landing. But they could not get into the engine to see how it worked because it was an unknown alloy. So they were trying to invent a new type of anti-gravity drive based on a few clues.

I mean we are not trying to defy gravity, but there a shitton of unknown unsolved problems. You can't promise or create marketing for a feature unless we already know it's possible. For starters.

But the issue is worse than that. What generally happens is once one part of the new engine is barely working, they demand another new invention that has to be completes in the same deadline before the other one has corner cases examined even.