Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?
2 by null_object | 1 comments on Hacker News.
What would be a good and not career-destroying approach to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on when a bug will be fixed? For some context, this arose in a pre-release application-critical bug that several people had attempted to solve, but which we had no insight into the cause. As it turned-out, the external partner for whom we were building the application had supplied one wrong piece of configuration - but this information was confidential to their setup, and we had no insight into how it would break another part of a complex flow (or even that it existed). The essential problem, is that the management simply sent out a mail to the whole team saying the bug should be fixed by the next day at 'close-of-business'. Question is how to deal with this sort of management behavior without ending your career? I'm aiming to find some constructive way to help them in the future to see why bugs can't always yield predictably to time-boxed developer effort.