Going to join you in this rant if you don&#x27;t mind.<p>&gt;  Most can&#x27;t tell their manager that it will take 2 weeks to parse a CSV because the source data is shit and they have too many other things they are working on. So they stay an extra 6 hours in the office and get called a rock-star until the day that they opt to go to their child&#x27;s school play instead.<p>Ugh! For real! I had this happen to me recently. I have trouble telling people &quot;No&quot;, and pushy PMs who also happen to be my friends means that I often bite off more than I can chew, and have to either &quot;be a rockstar&quot; (which you start to realize isn&#x27;t such a compliment), or deliver late &#x2F; fail to deliver.<p>So I just started being a dick about it, and it works for me. If I say no too politely, it&#x27;s really easy to convince me to change to a yes. My turning point was when discussing a project that was much more complex than management assumed it would be (I&#x27;m compelled to link the relevant xkcd [0]), and I already felt overwhelmed on my current projects.<p>The discussion was something like &quot;Ok, how about by this date? What about by this date? What if we dropped these features?&quot;, I thought for a moment and responded &quot;Ok, look. I can promise you any date you want, and we can shake hands and leave this meeting. But I&#x27;m telling you the reality is I can&#x27;t do it, and it won&#x27;t be done. If you&#x27;d like to take some of my other projects and move them into the <i>will not be done</i> category, we can talk. I&#x27;m only saying this because I don&#x27;t want to agree to a deadline and then be constantly thinking &#x27;Oh well, that&#x27;s the date I&#x27;m getting fired.&#x27;&quot;<p>I&#x27;m very lucky that everyone here is really nice, and realized how stressed I must have been to react like that. So we&#x27;ve reprioritized some things and are beginning to outsource some of my more menial tasks that took up a lot of time.<p>Didn&#x27;t really intend for that story to have a point, just venting something my non-dev friends don&#x27;t relate to. I guess the point could be that the problem isn&#x27;t just caused by bad managers, or bad dev estimates, or bad process, it&#x27;s a little bit of everything, and the ratios are different for every company or person.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1425&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1425&#x2F;</a>