I feel you're missing the point. Your angle is self perpetuating. People have a higher risk of cardiac arrest at the fear of the consequences of missing the IRS date. The argument being made is that there won't really be any major consequences - if millions of people miss it because of a TurboTax issue, an extension will be granted.

Why should the engineers be stressed and overworked because other people are scared of something that doesn't have to happen?

The world is less stressful and - I think - better without manufactured urgency like what you're defending.

Don't get me wrong, some things are life and death, like life support machines. Taxes are not.

Pretend it's a smaller company. 100k people late. That's small enough to make a special exception quite unlikely, but big enough to be a lot of very stressed people. It's not self-perpetuating logic, it's how deadlines work. Letting those engineers off the hook won't solve the deadline, those people will just be told they should have done it sooner and they will suffer the consequences.

Despite not being anywhere near life or death, the stress is real. And for most people it's not crippling stress, but neither is being on call for a single week out of the year. If we're going to blow that level of on-call into a "risk of cardiac arrest" then to be reasonable we have to do the same thing for tax filing failures.

There's no way for deadlines to not be moderately stressful. You can't decide to avoid urgency and stress.

Again, you're still missing the point by trying to focus on specific examples that perpetuate the idea that everything must have a deadline and a deadline must be fixed and heavily consequential.

If you keep on creating examples where x number of people face consequences for being late, then yes, there will always be stressful consequences for being late.

Yes, there will always be situations like this, actual life or death situations. Don't release this update to address a newly spotted bug, pacemakers are all going to switch off at midnight and people die - worth the stress from the engineer and everyone else involved to keep people alive.

Is a tax return one of those things? It doesn't have to be. Unless you want to insist it has to be. That is my point.

> There's no way for deadlines to not be moderately stressful. You can't decide to avoid urgency and stress.

Owners of deadlines can decide to avoid urgency and stress if they have the resources to be flexible with submissions. Most deadlines are not life, death, urgency and stress, unless people make them to be.