Thread by @colmmacc

Mini-thread: How do you push back on unrealistic deadlines and false urgency? or balance having a life with busting your ass on an ambitious project? or argue for quality over shot-cuts? You have to time travel ...

It's really really important, and super effective and neutralizing, to frame every decision from the perspective of a few months, or even years, from now. Ask yourself, and others, "What will we think about this decision then?".

O.k., some examples ...

Classic example: team manager is really pushing to hit the sprint deadline, but hitting it will mean working evenings or the end of the year. Ask if they're even going to remember hitting or missing that deadline at the end of year. Does it really matter?

Here at AWS, if it's the weeks before Re:Invent, I'll absolutely work a few evenings and even weekends; because I know that I *will* regret missing an opportunity with thousands of my customers right there to impress.

But if it's some random sprint, middle of the year, whatever; life is too short! It's not worth it.

Another classic example: Operations is heavy right now, team can barely keep up with tickets. Do we spend the remaining dev cycles on hitting a date goal for a new important feature? Or do we spend it on automation and reducing ops.

If you frame that decision in the short term, you'll get a feature, and probably also burn out. Don't do that! Think about how many more features you'll ship in a year, if you get the ops burden down. Do that!

And when you frame things like this to people, ask them to bring that framing with them when they explain it to others. It's very effective at de-escalating urgency-driven conflict. Remind people that we have get more done over longer periods of time too.

Apply it to yourself: If you're pushing for quality on a project, you really want just that bit of polish; ask yourself what you'll want or regret about that a year from now. A year later, will you appreciate having waited to get it right? Or will it barely make a difference.

An interesting way to think about your career and influence is to focus on growing the length of time you should be totally autonomous for, and successfully thinking ahead with visions.

E.g. a summer intern should be able to be autonomous for about a day, able to work on day-sized chunks of work without guidance. And depth of vision should be about 3 months.

A new SDE: autonomy = about a week, vision = still around 3 months
A career SDE: autonomy = about a sprint, vision = around 6 months
A lead SDE: autonomy = 2 or 3 sprints, vision = around 6 months
Principal+: autonomy = 6 months, vision = year plus

Whatever is right for you, be thinking "there" in your head, living in the future, and evaluating every decision and trade-off from that context.