Jumping from one extreme (completely broken development process) to another (threatening to voluntarily resign if arbitrary deadlines aren’t hit) just feels like a sequence of unhealthy extremes driven more by ideology than practicality.
It’s great that the process worked out, but I’d not be happy to work under either team to be honest. Plenty of teams manage to ship working code without either of these problems.
The key point is that the team in this story didn’t. They needed something extreme to make progress.
And remember that nearly all deadlines are arbitrary. Somebody needs to pick some date to see if something gets done by that date. There’s nothing wrong with an “arbitrary” deadline like the one described in the article.
> Somebody needs to pick some date to see if something gets done by that date.
Right. What you don’t need to do is say “I am going to hold my team to the arbitrary date I ballparked because I staked my reputation on hitting it no matter what”. That’s a miserable way to work.
I lost at lot of faith in the author's judgment at this point. I know this thing worked out and it was the right decision to port things over to React (and correct the bad decision to count on the Angular team to deliver SSR on their timelines). But you need to be able to explain things to the business without this sort of nonsense. I would be really concerned if I heard a manager saying something like that. It's not an argument, it's just a "trust me" that raises the stakes and pressure around the project.