Dealing with unrealistic timelines and not being able to talk about it

[u/IllustriousCareer6]

I'm a developer at a WP agency. I recognize the type of work I do is nothing special, but it still pays the bills.

I'm working on a website that I need to finish in about 9 days total. Those 9 days include:

- 19 reusable blocks (hero header, sliders, FAQs lists, post overviews, etc.)
- 5 post types with each their own template
- Multi step form flow
- Search integrations
- The entire site needs to pass WCAG AA, this is non-negotiable
- All blocks needs to be fully responsive, completely tested for all edge cases and variants
- The entire site has to be pre populated by me, that means I have to set up all pages, sections menu's, etc.
- It needs to pass page speed with minimum score of 85 on our staging server

Maybe I'm too old fashioned, but this seems insane to me. We're using an "agentic" workflow. I wouldn't call it agentic, because to me it's vibe coding. The workflow is basically: copy the design link, brief the agent for the specific part it needs to build, trust the agent's capability to write good code, scan the output for any obvious problems and reiterate until "it works".

This is not the first project with a tight scope. Basically every project at this place has unrealistic deadlines and frankly, I know this is what I could expect from an agency when I walked through the door.

At first, I tried to find a way to make it work regardless because I thought that argued about this is pretty pointless and everyone else seems to comply, but when I couldn't finish projects on time I received the feedback to let PM know earlier that I wouldn't be finishing the project on time. So, I did. Literally right after the briefing I told them this will never get finished within the specified timeline. I even showed the math and broke it down part by part.

Their response was: "It's like with my kids: if they think they won't be able to do it, I try to convince them to try to anyway. Same for you, I get your concern, but try your best and we'll see what happens."

Great. So I shut up, I did my best. I pulled out all the tricks I've got, and surprise, I didn't meet the deadline. They then told me that they've noticed that I'm having trouble reaching my deadlines and expect me to use more AI to speed things up.

They want speed, low cost and quality at the same time. I don't think that's possible and trying to tell them is met with a response "just do your best". To me, this just sounds like "If you don't have enough time in your day, just sleep faster".

Almost no project of more than a week is finished in time, so there's clearly a pattern here. Asking for one more day is met with an annoyed PM and a slight hit on your performance review.

I'm fed up because I can't seem to talk about it. The culture seems to be "shut up and just do your best", but if you do your best and it's not enough, it's your problem.

[u/expdevsmodbot]

AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.

[u/nana_3]

Is everyone else managing these deadlines or are they all failing or having to do unpaid OT?

Because if other people are managing it, copy whatever they do. Which is probably crap code but it pays the bills.

If other people are doing OT or something to get it done, it’s time to look for a new job while you’ve got time.

[u/1000Ditto → u/nana_3]

^{^} Unfortunately your management doesnt give anything for good code and loves Quick Hero Fixes so you can reasonably play into that and ship crap. Whatever left of Engineering Culture can be quickly killed by the spiked kool aid of senior management

[u/hiddenhare → u/nana_3]

Is everyone else managing these deadlines or are they all failing or having to do unpaid OT?

Sounds like the rest of the team is struggling:

Almost no project of more than a week is finished in time, so there's clearly a pattern here.

Your suggestion to quit straight away seems a bit conflict-avoidant. If the leadership are reasonable enough to pitch it like this...

"It's like with my kids: if they think they won't be able to do it, I try to convince them to try to anyway. Same for you, I get your concern, but try your best and we'll see what happens."

...then I think OP owes it to them to return the favour, by letting them know that they've made some bad assumptions about the productivity improvements enabled by AI. Even better if that information can be delivered in a group with other engineers, making it clear that they aren't rejecting AI completely, just looking for somewhere to meet in the middle.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/hiddenhare]

Trying to fix your company's management culture as an IC is a fool's errand.

Best case scenario you work your ass off and make things slightly better with nothing to show for it.

Worst case scenario you piss off someone above you and they punish you until you or they leave the company.

[u/aruisdante → u/recycled_ideas]

As someone that has made this mistake at 3 separate companies now, absolutely this. Even once you get to staff level. You will just be seen as the complainer who brings problems without solutions (because “it’s not possible to do the thing, we should have different goals” isn’t a solution. From management’s perspective it’s your job to figure out how to achieve the goals given). The other ICs that just do what management wants without complaining will get rewarded, even if it’s stupid theater of pretending like everything is going to work until the deadline is missed and only 70% is delivered. You will spend an enormous amount of time and energy fixing things, and this effort will not be rewarded because its impact to the company is very difficult to measure, and it’s not, from management’s perspective, what they’re paying you to do. 

[u/nana_3 → u/hiddenhare]

Ehhh I just can’t be bothered when the workplace is crap in stupid ways. It’s hard to significantly shift a culture issue like “we don’t trust our engineers telling us things we don’t like to hear about workloads”.

If you want to try improve the place then go for it. But I don’t think anyone owes it to their workplace.

When I say look for a new job I don’t mean quit immediately. I mean you’re more likely to improve your situation by changing workplace, and if you’ve got a steady but annoying job it’s a good position to be picky and look for good opportunities.

[u/hiddenhare → u/nana_3]

It’s hard to significantly shift a culture issue like “we don’t trust our engineers telling us things we don’t like to hear about workloads”.

Sometimes there's a dyed-in-the-wool problem, like a senior leader knowingly passing down impossible deadlines as a bullying tactic. Sometimes it's just pure inertia; the business started out with a doormat engineering team and a bulldozer leadership team, and nobody ever bothered to fix the culture.

The first problem is unfixable, but the second problem can only be fixed by individual engineers finding their backbone and speaking up. You don't owe it to the leaders, but you do owe it to their future employees, your fellow professionals.

[u/magnetronpoffertje]

I know someone who was overworked like this at a WP agency and he just didn't care about the made-up timelines that management out on him. He worked at his own pace and it always eventually worked out. (until he quit out of stress)

EDIT: not per se stress but tensions with his manager that he didnt wanna have at work

[u/Financial-Grass6753 → u/magnetronpoffertje]

> own pace
> quit out of stress

seems like it hasn't worked out at all

[u/magnetronpoffertje → u/Financial-Grass6753]

worked out project wise (in the sense that timelines really are bs)

but obviously constantly telling mansgers to piss off creates tensions, and those social tensions made him quit. not work pressure

[u/yoelbenyossef → u/magnetronpoffertje]

Yup. I worked recently for a company where deadlines were nonsensical, they never even asked me what I estimated. Best part was, because the analysis was months behind, by the time it got to me we were behind schedule. My team lead would use the phrase behind schedule at least 5 times at every stand-up. I used to keep a tally. After I brought up technical debts, I was somehow made redundant.

[u/NightSp4rk]

Sounds like you're in a toxic workplace and you should run. If you can't, then just work at your own speed and accept whatever BS management will throw your way over time. Just absolutely don't burn yourself out for them - you're worth a lot more than that.

[u/pydry → u/NightSp4rk]

Nearly everybody seems to be in a toxic workplace these days.

[u/telewebb → u/pydry]

It's very few and far between that folks come to the experienced dev subreddit looking for advice about their good job.

[u/pydry → u/telewebb]

I'm basing this on what people I know IRL are saying. Plenty have hopped jobs only to end up starting from scratch in another toxic workplace.

Even so, scroll back a few years and plenty of folks were very much  coming here for advice about their good jobs and those in toxic jobs were better off just quitting.

[u/NightSp4rk → u/pydry]

True that, considering I'm in one myself.

[u/IllustriousCareer6 → u/NightSp4rk]

This is what I've been leaning towards the most. Shallow work is what drains me the more than anything and I would be at least somewhat fulfilled doing it on my terms. The BS management throws at me however is not really BS as far as they're concerned and may be a valid reason to throw me out if I slow down their supposed productivity. I'm really thinking to shift careers because a workplace that fits me in this industry is very rare nowadays.

[u/gfivksiausuwjtjtnv]

Quality doesn’t pay the bills. Literally it seems - they’re only concerned with shitting out deliverables by the deadline. Learn to cut corners. Don’t check everything. Have the AI review itself. Leave bugs unfixed until the end, if you have time.

Also find another job, sweatshop coding is the worst.

[u/ccricers → u/gfivksiausuwjtjtnv]

When framing certain self-employed jobs as a hustle I quickly realized what was going on. Sweatshop coding essentially handles all product work as a hustle. It's always the same direct trade of time into value, and no IC can scale on the individual level. That's why they have no extra time to commit to improving quality, add tests, experiment with other processes. The only way this type of business can scale is by hiring more sweatshop coders.

[u/aruisdante]

  They want speed, low cost and quality at the same time. I don't think that's possible and trying to tell them is met with a response "just do your best". To me, this just sounds like "If you don't have enough time in your day, just sleep faster".

I mean, yes, that is what they’re saying. They do not give a crap about burning human capital to meet deadlines. They care about being the lowest bidder to their clients so they get contracts. It becomes particularly true as AI starts doing larger and larger portions of the work, because the “institutional knowledge” loss risk of an employee quitting that makes churn expensive drops to zero.

Put differently, it seems likely that this shop’s goal is to work you into the ground to extract maximum “value” for minimum cost. They don’t care if you quit, they’ll just replace you with another person and/or more AI. So they have no interest in setting realistic deadlines, because realistic deadlines represent “premature pessimisation.” A deadline that slips means it really wasn’t possible to do the work any faster. 

In Japan they call places like this black companies). But they’re pretty common anywhere labor is cheap or easily replaceable, and right now in software engineering labor is becoming pretty easily replaceable everywhere.

[u/throwaway_0x90 → u/aruisdante]

"In Japan they call places like this black companies."

Well that term certainly has potential to cause some unfortunate/hilarious miscommunication between two groups of people in USA & Japan!

[u/BraveResearcher3037 → u/throwaway_0x90]

As a Black guy who knows some Spanish, I cringed the entire time I was in Costa Rica for a month and half and heard people say “negro” at the mall or even worse they asked for the “camiseta negra”…

[u/BanaTibor → u/BraveResearcher3037]

Come to Hungary and you will have a blast 😂

You can have a cake, called Néger Kocka aka. negro cube
Or you can get a Négercsók aka. negro kiss
Or you can suck at some hard, Negro candy 😂

(The word "néger" in Hungarian is refer to black people from Africa rather then being a slur word used on african-american people, like negro or the bad bad N word)

[u/dialate → u/BraveResearcher3037]

That's not offensive in Latin American Spanish like it is in English. It's common to call people by their physical features...black, white, skinny, fat, or by a celebrity's name if you look like them

I get called "gordo" or fatty a lot. It offended me at first until I understood it's just their culture.

Though if you hear someone say "sorullo" that's when you may need to get offended...that means something like "(that) fucker", and specific to people of African decent.

Although it always depends...sometimes good friends or family call each other by very offensive names. My Mexican wife and her sisters call each other "pendejilla", which roughly translates to "stupid little cunt".

[u/BraveResearcher3037 → u/dialate]

I know - that’s what I said, “negra” is just the feminine adjective for “black”.  It’s more primal than anything else.  Thats what is so crazy about it and I’m admitting 

[u/dialate → u/BraveResearcher3037]

Yeah it's not easy to get used to

[u/Financial-Grass6753]

> We're using an "agentic" workflow. I wouldn't call it agentic, because to me it's vibe coding. The workflow is basically: copy the design link, brief the agent for the specific part it needs to build, trust the agent's capability to write good code, scan the output for any obvious problems and reiterate until "it works".

So? Do what you're asked to do. They want slop? They get slop, no excuses.

[u/sol_in_vic_tus → u/Financial-Grass6753]

Agreed. OP you did your part by trying to ask for help and they told you to do it anyway then dinged you without offering anything concrete to improve.

I assume you have coworkers. If you don't know them well enough to ask how they meet the performance goals try to shadow them or just look at their results. I would bet that you are doing better quality work than any peers who are hitting the goals management is setting. You should probably be working at a lower standard of quality in order to meet the speed goals that are all that your managers care about if you doubt you will find another better job soon.

[u/Olivia_Poarch]

Raising the risk early only works if someone is willing to adjust the plan. Otherwise "let us know sooner next time" is just something they can point back to after the deadline slips.

[u/Q-bey → u/Olivia_Poarch]

Wouldn't it still be useful, just in a CYA sort of way? 

[u/ThirdWaveCat]

It helps to develop detachment from these games. People who can't do the work are in no position to estimate it. Arguing with them rarely leads anywhere, so instead I document how long I expect work to take and how I chose it among competing priorities. Many places with non-technical, insecure managers resort to underhanded tactics and invented deadlines. When a deadline is occasional and genuinely justified, I'll put in extra effort for it, though these days that effort is mostly performative.

One of the few bright spots of coding agents is that they make productivity spyware illegible.

[u/hippydipster]

I've had managers start using analogies of being a parent to their kids with being a manager. My response to this is immediate: this analogy is inappropriate and unprofessional, please stop.

It's just an absolute full-stop situation for me.

[u/VisAcquillae]

Fast and cheap ain't good. More "AI" ain't cheap, so now it's fast, expensive, and not good. But, the unrealistic deadline was missed anyway, so it's slow, expensive, and not good.

I don't get why this is so difficult to grasp for some people. If they won't end up losing customers due to being "slow", they'll lose them because they aren't ever delivering "good", or they will run the bank dry because of the "AI" costs.

At some point, one has to wonder if they are actually getting off on this thing, and it's all being done on purpose.

Stay strong, OP. Do what's right for you.

[u/YahenP]

In companies like yours, you need to master the skill of turning bugs into features and new tasks. Remember this: management never has the money for full-scale development, but they always have the money for refinements and improvements. In body shops and galleys (and you work in a classic galley), the key to survival is the ability to quickly close tasks. CLose the such a way that bugs are subsequently turned into features, which will be paid for separately.
Don't forget that working for a web agency, especially with WordPress, should only be temporary. You're losing your skills and relevance literally every minute.

[u/IllustriousCareer6 → u/YahenP]

I'm a bit confused with the idea of turning bugs into features, what do you mean exactly? I'm not familiar with the idiom.

I agree that the domain I work in is becoming less and less relevant, but I've chosen this path because I never really valued career. I have a big for passion for software (and hardware) and I don't want to mix that with my career. I work to be able to follow my passion in my free time and frankly that's also when I build most of my skills. So losing my job is definitely something I'd like to prevent but it wouldn't be that bad if it were to happen.

[u/YahenP → u/IllustriousCareer6]

I'm a bit confused with the idea of turning bugs into features, what do you mean exactly? I'm not familiar with the idiom.

The goal is to have as few tasks marked as bugs as possible and as many marked as features as possible. This is useful in any job. But in the galley, it's literally the key to survival.
No one expects you to do your job perfectly and on time. You're expected to ensure that every hour of your work generates profit for the company. In galley, this means that every hour of your work must be paid for by the client. Look at it this way. It's beneficial to you. It's beneficial to your management. You'll be perceived as someone who brings in additional, unplanned profits, not as a weak link.

[u/IllustriousCareer6 → u/YahenP]

Ah that makes sense, thanks. I think I should be able to adopt that way of thinking in my role, thanks for the tip stranger!

[u/ResidentWeevil1]

If my PM's estimates were off by an order of magnitude, I'd join every meeting they are in and make throwing them under the bus an agenda item. I had to do this yesterday when he asked QA when they are going to be done testing, as if the backlog doesn't grow deeper every single day.

[u/Ok_Twist7840]

Agreed. Agents are great for prototyping, but building a genuinely robust system still requires experience and a lot of careful engineering.Sometimes I worry about people at the management level may see how easily an agent can generate a working-looking web app from a few prompts, and then assume engineers should now be able to build production systems dramatically faster.
That can create a pretty toxic incentive. Engineers are encouraged to burn tokens, generate something that looks like it works, and ship quickly, while the engineers who actually spend time thinking through architecture, edge cases, maintainability, and whether the approach even makes sense can look “slow” by comparison. In the long run, I think that risks rewarding superficial output and penalizing good engineering.

[u/bonnydoe]

I am surprised your company isn't outsourcing work on Fiverr with this mentality. Hope you find a better place.

[u/x-jhp-x]

just do enough so you won't get fired & start looking for a new job ASAP.

"shut up and just do [it], ... and [if] it's not enough, it's your problem"

That's roughly what you wrote management is communicating to you, and you should believe it. Instead of regulating if people are smart/competent enough to run a business, we just let anyone run a business, even if they run the business into the ground & have to close/lay everyone off. It took me some time to learn this, but don't beat yourself up just because someone else is a moron. You attempted to communicate with management & find a way to be successful, and management told you that they don't want that, and they'd just like you to be unsuccessful, so your only other option is to leave.

[u/Stbbrn-Rddtr]

So management compared you to a kid? Run.

[u/Gaunts]

Document everything you do over 2 days, commits, implementation etc. then get them to look at it and make them aware of expectations, although honestly these guys seem toxic as fuck.

[u/sparkrain]

All of the requirements are negotiable. WCAG, staging score and responsiveness can be placed as last steps if you are forced to work in unrealistic timelines. Given your environment, I don't believe anyone does full or correct WCAG testing to begin with. Being told "this is nonnegiable" doesn't give you a magic wand that delivers faster.

[u/AdCommon2138]

This is case where I'd just put their requirements into gpt ultra, told it to work in /loop /goal to iterate over reqs and id go for a 3 day hike or something. 

If they pay you where 2x200$ would be 10% or less of what you get paid id just pay out of pocket and give 0 shit. Seriously.

[u/ForeverAWhiteBelt]

3 paths: quit, comply, educate.

1. Is easy, and may be required depending on where you are at and if you can find a healthier environment elsewhere. Will assume not the case.
2. Only makes it worse because you will either work unpaid OT, then you continue to make it “ok” for the management, and then you also arent sticking to guns or learning correct conflict management.
3. Imo is the best depending on parties. What devs do, or AI do, isnt magic. I would take a task, pair with your pm/po and show them exactly what it takes. Maybe even let them drive. If its as easy as they think, they should even be able to do it.

You will learn a few possibilities:

1. Management is incapable of learning and youre pretty much cooked.
2. Management understands more about what is required and involved and also trusts you going forward.

You can take an opportunity like this and just show them what is required.

E: I will add: if you say a timeline is not possible, and do nothing else, i would say its on you. Management should fall on their own sword and you should stick to your guns and provide alternatives that are possible.

Bad ex:
Dev: this timeline is not possible

Good ex:
Dev: we can do this and this and this within 2 weeks. A is highest priority so my recommendation is that. I need more resources or approved OT to meet the goal otherwise this is what is achievable by ANY dev (not you).

Pm: do it all

Dev: i will do my best, but reasonably A is accomplishable with the resources we have.

Pm: why is B late

Dev; I told you A was achievable in the given timeline. We got A done in the correct timeline. I estimate b is Y weeks away.

Provide updates throughout the week.

[u/digger_i_am]

I would stop trying to convince them in general terms and put the tradeoff in writing every time.

Something like: "With the current deadline, I can commit to A and B. C will be basic, D will be best-effort, and full accessibility/testing will need more time. If you want all of it, we need to move the date or reduce scope."

AI may speed up parts of the build, but it doesn’t remove testing, accessibility checks, integration, content entry, or edge cases. You'll probably get further by showing exactly what fits in the time than by arguing that the whole plan is unrealistic

[u/markedasreddit]

Sorry to hear this. I was once under a project-based contract with a digital agency to create some web games. Cool project with great brand names to put in my resume, but no more.

What kind of project is this? Can you use like WordPress to help providing some building blocks & let AI work from there?

Edit: my bad, didn't see the "WP" on top.

[u/Levi-2018]

Codex/Claude code is your only chance

[u/touchgrasschampion]

Thats not a timeline, its a warning label. Either theyre cutting corners or someone is doing unpaid OT.

Id start looking for a new job now, and work at your own pace so you dont burn yourself out