I have to spend the day working with a thesis student who needs to finish up by tomorrow (no pressure), so I don't have time to write up the seven-part detailed explanation of the physics of deep-fried turkey that I was hoping to do. Maybe next year.
In its place, inspired by Backreaction's post on scaling behavior, here's a question for my readership:
How do you feel about deadlines?
Do you do your best work with a tight deadline, or do you seize up under the pressure? Does the approach of an important deadline lead you into a procrastinatory frenzy in which you affix processed meat to domestic animals, or does it make you unplug the Ethernet cable and get down to businss?
Or do you just lean back and groove to the whooshing sound as the deadline flies on by?
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Someone has got to give you Douglas Adams's take on deadlines and it looks like I got here first:
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise that they make as they fly by".
Can't respond now: I've got to get this paper off before tomorrow.
Where I work, there's no such thing as missing a deadline. All the documents I work on are managed using version control software. When the deadline comes, the admins lock down permissions on all the files so no further editing is possible. This leads to conversations like this:
Manager: When is the documentation going to be done?
Me: When I run out of time.
Manager: [...]
I almost have to have a deadline in order to be productive - I turned into a slug on one assignment because the deadlines (set by a NASA mission whose launch kept slipping) moved so far in the future as to be meaningless; there was no sense of urgency at all. Now, I'd rather not have looming deadlines, but I can deal with them better than I can deal with the other extreme.
Thanks that you also liked this semi-silly plot!
As for deadlines, they make me finish up all kind of other work that before has looked extremely unattractive to do...
It depends not only on the person, but the type of work being done. Any highly coordinated effort, like large project engineering, where you need to work multiple highly intricate tasks in parallel, suffers dramatically when the deadlines are too tight.
I don't care what kinda hero you are (and most of us, frankly, aren't that kinda hero anyway) if your co-workers are making pressure-mistakes, then your bottom line is going to go down the toilet, too.
Well, it's 6:45 AM, I have a Quantum Mechanics problem set due in 5 hours, and I'm reading your blog. I think that should be sufficient answer.
Re: #4 "... deadlines (set by a NASA mission whose launch kept slipping)..."
Traditionally, launches that don't slip meant real hard deadlines. We know where that planet will be, when this spacecraft gets there, and when you guys better have the hardware ready for launch.
However, by the time I was Mission Planning Engineer on Voyager, for the flyby of Uranus, software guys at JPL had learned that these were soft deadlines. One can always write some of the flight software later, and uplink it to the spacecraft.
Since software + hardware = system, that means that the spacecraft, as a system, changed considerably after launch. For instance, there was a block of memory in Software , 256 words, where the first bit was always 1. So code was written in which each instruction had an op code whose first bit was 1, so as to not waste the memory (which was a diminished natural resource).
Voyager evolved the ability to compress pictures better, using the original error-detection-error-correction hardware (Golay coding) plus a layer of software compression and error-detection-error-correction.
I fought long and hard, finally winning through the intervention of Chief Scientist Ed Stone (later JPL Administrator) to change the spacecraft attutude control from 1-axis to 2-axis, in order to reduce smear in pictures taken at Uranus, roughly twice as far from the sun as Saturn, and thus 1/4 the light level, and thus 4 times the exposure time, and thus the need for an anti-smear campaign. At Hackers 4.0 this got me voted #2 for Hack of the Year, well behind the guy with the recumbent bicycle and cell-phone internet hook-up, with keyboard in the handlebars.
Just-in-time systems design replaced old fashioned deadlines.
The slack thus generated allowed some managers to waste time by reformulating schedules every single day, thanks to the new-fangled PERT chart software just available on Macintoshes such as the one my supervisor had. He'd been a decent engineer, over in the Robotics section, but, armed with a Macintosh and schedule-generation power, a terrifyingly bad manager.
NASA, deadlines... a long story. But I'm going to avoid saying anything about Space Shuttle launches in frozen conditions to please White House operatives.
Because that danged Challenger disaster drowned out the press coverage of our super-successful Uranus encounter. Everyone talks about those poor astronauts, poor teacher, sad students, and feynman's ice-water demo on live TV, but nobody ever talks about frustrated software engineers and their schedules. Until now.
My apartment was always *spotless* for the ~24-48 hours before any major assignments were due. All fresh produce was washed, prepped, bagged, etc.
I don't think I've ironed a single damn thing since I graduated college, but *boy* I had some smart-looking shirts back in the day.