When you ask the PM which one of two projects is of higher priority because there isn't enough time to complete both and he responds "of course project A is of higher priority but project B needs to be finished by next week! *leaves room*"

Cause genius.

Welcome to devRant.

Rule #1 Never ask for projects priorities.

Rule #2 Loop (Rule #1)

Welcome to devRant! Bad management.

I can relate to it 😅

Send an email to him CC'ing your team saying something like I completely understand that project A is higher priority, but due to the hard deadline of Project B, I will be focusing my efforts on that to make sure we hit that date. This will also allow us to 100% focus on Project A quicker as B will be completed on time and out of mind.

If (s)he writes back anything other than fine, then write that you can multi-task, but that greatly increases the chance of the deadline being missed and/or bugs being accidentally introduced in Projects A and B due to us not allowing to spend as much time on either project due to the split priorities. Please confirm that is a risk that they want to take.

This situation happens quite often at where I work and the solution to the problem was unsurprisingly the same as always : split the team, make everyone work twice as fast (at least in the manager's imagination) and somehow meet the minimum requirement of what the customer expects. Cleanup of hacks and workarounds can be done afterwards, but usually never happens as they're not in the project's budget.

The larger the company the less does responsibility go hand in hand with accountability...