Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable deadlines. They don’t think about their action in such terms; they think rather that what they’re doing is throwing down an interesting challenge to their workers, something to help them strive for excellence. Experienced (jaded) workers know otherwise. They know that under the gun, their

So far, the results confirm the folklore: Programmers seem to be a bit more productive after they’ve done the estimate themselves, compared to cases in which the manager did it without even consulting them.

Once that idea is digested, the worker is lost forever after to the project. The realization that one has sacrificed a more important value (family, love, home, youth) for a less important value (work) is devastating. It makes the person who has unwittingly sacrificed seek revenge. He doesn’t go to the boss and explain calmly and thoughtfully that

causes of interruption, the incoming telephone call. It’s nothing to field 15 calls in a day. It may be nothing, but because of the associated reimmersion time, it can use up most of that day. When the day is over and you’re wondering where the time went, you can seldom even remember who called you or why.

If you didn’t know that few managers receive any management training at all, you might think there was a school they all went to for an intensive course on Parkinson’s Law and its ramifications. Even managers that know they know nothing about management nonetheless cling to that one axiomatic truth governing people and their attitude toward work:

People who had ten years of experience did not outperform those with two years of experience. There was no correlation between experience and performance except that those with less than six months’ experience with the language used in the exercise did not do as well as the rest of the sample.

For the overwhelming majority of the bankrupt projects we studied, there was not a single technological issue to explain the failure.

Saving money on space may be costing you a fortune.

Bad estimates, hopelessly tight estimates, sap the builders’ energy. Capers Jones, known for his metric studies of development projects, puts it this way: “When the schedule for a project is totally unreasonable and unrealistic, and no amount of overtime can allow it to be made, the project team becomes angry and frustrated . . . and morale drops