December 31, 2024
As a software engineer, it’s basically impossible to survive poor work-volume management. You can try cutting corners, making extreme tactical decisions, triaging your issues, whatever…but the burn-down chart does not lie. A strategic decision by management (or worse, executives) to ignore burn-down rates is basically irrecoverable.
As a manager, be honest to your executives and your reports. Given enough people in your team, there is no tactical decision that will make your engineers work faster. Your only real option is to admit early that your deadline is untenable, and replan by reducing features, or extending deadlines. Whipping your engineers to work harder has never worked, and will ruin their trust in you forever.