My CTO told the COO and CEO i'd be finished SOC2 compliance by the end of December... On December 14th.

It takes 3 months to do the audit, let alone all the actual work. I hadn't even started yet.

He was fired shortly after that.

The most unrealistic deadline? Okay, here it goes. For context, this is one of my earliest jobs, and I’m actively using React.

— Kiki, I have a stunning idea! Let’s build a Figma clone!
— Okaaaay, 🧐
— You have two days.
— A what?
— I’ve just stumbled upon an amazing new technology. You maybe don’t know it yet. It’s called React.js, and you totally can build a full Figma clone in two days using it!
— …
— It’s a revolution, and you’re so ignorant for not following it. Are you even a real engineer?
— …

Two days later:
— Forget about Figma! Let’s build an online DAW for musicians!

That guy was nuts. I left when we had an executive meeting, I was explaining tech things, and he suddenly popped out a fucking tambourine and started striking it. One year later, he lost everything and went to get a junior C++ position at an outsourcing company.

Once, I overheard a conversation between my former PM and a client during a phone call.

Client: I will send the final draft of the project by Thursday.

PM: That's great to hear!

Client: When can I expect the updates to review the changes after the draft is sent? I need to present it at a meeting this weekend.

PM: It should be ready by Friday without fail!

Client: Excellent! Thank you. I will be expecting it.

PM: Sure, goodbye.

(After the call, PM joined the team.)

PM: So, team, the client for Project-A will be sending us a new draft for review and updates. They are putting a lot of pressure on us and need it to be ready by Friday at the latest. We need to treat this with a sense of urgency.

(After hearing this, we felt compelled to respond.)

Me: There's no way they would expect us to deliver an unseen draft within a day. Both the backend and Figma team members were forced to work last weekend, on Saturday, because you mentioned that Project B was behind schedule and the client needed an update by Monday. We simply can't continue working like this.

Backend guy 2: I also worked last Sunday on Project B.

Me: We overheard you telling the client that they should expect an update by Friday. It seems like you're the one directly putting the team under pressure, even though we still have three ongoing projects with tight deadlines.

(The office fell into an uncomfortable silence.)
(PM left the office without saying a word.)

Later on, I heard that he contacted the client to reschedule the expected time of arrival (ETA) after receiving the draft.

Most unrealistic deadline I've had?

The client gives us a project with A 3-month deadline. All good, at first.

3 days later they told us that they're cutting out the funding and they gave us two options: Either stop the project right away and get paid for the work so far, or somehow finish the project in 7 days and get paid for the 10 days worth of work.

My idiot boss chose the second.

Saturdays and Sundays were declared working days, everyone screaming at each other, devs running around scrambling code to make the webpage render and keep it responsive.

Forget unit or automation testing, we only did not null and undefined testing and submitted the project.

Yeah, I hauled my ass out of the company just after that.

hey, my dudes!!! here's our class last assignment!!

oh yeah!!

you've got a week

teacher, are we supposed to pick one from those 30 programs?

no, you each do all of them

its says here it must be in ansi C

then it must be ansi C, dummy

deadline says friday. next friday?

this friday, 18:00

...

Migrate and entire fucking ERP system in NINE DAYS.
"It's just copy and paste!"
Yeah, if both systems worked exactly the same. And if they do, why switch?

We were once tasked to create a 3-part Flash game to advertise the upcoming release of an album by a very famous band. Every part used a different gaming engine which we had to build from scratch (one of which was like a simplified version of the OG GTA game - top down driving with zooming in etc). On top of this we had to deal with user registration and score submission.

We had 4 weeks to do it in. We were 3 people.
We did an illegal number of hours to get as much done as we could, and we still didn't manage it in time because, frankly it was impossible.

Pretty good game though.

Someone wanted me to make a full system from zero with good UI/UX, for 2 different user types (think marketplace style), admin area, and cool features that could only be done through phones because the tech is not available in web. All of this with good security due to the delicate information it would handle. Also of course subscription support as well.

By myself, within a year.

3 weeks to make a full mobile application. As a junior. Beat this.

Got yelled at because super important feature for a client was two days overdue.
The kicker is that they never even talked to IT about the feature let alone give us a decent spec/assignment.

So I guess my most unrealistic deadline was the day before yesterday...

Risk engine for payment processing, with support for custom rules and third party integrations like IDology. Deadline was one week.

Using devrant on windows phone. Windows phones are so so so nice. Why microsoft did you stop windows phones. They are the best OS and greatest experience. Bring back windows phone please.

Ever since i learned terraform i cannot go back. I cant fucking use the ui anymore. This shit is too good. 1 command to create all bullshit and 1 command to destroy all bullshit. Fantastic. Misconfigured shit? Just fix it in a file and 1 command to update it. Perfect. Need to add more shit? Add more lines and 1 command to update. Shitastic. Instead of misconfiguring bullshit or forgetting to delete some shit manually i can simply just do it all 1 command no errors

HOWEVER i noticed sometimes even terraform gets fucked up with bullshit. When im destroying my infra it infinitely says destroying. As if its stuck in that loop. No idea why. So i have to manually destroy the bullshit and then run destroy a fww more times till it works

This happened a few years ago. We started this new project that was estimated to take 3 devs around 5 months to complete. We had a meeting where the client, the project manager, me and two other devs were present. When the client asked if we were still on track to complete the project by the end of September, the PM just said “yeah we are totally on track, no worries”.
Me and the other devs looked us straight in the eyes and nonverbally agreed that this guy has to be sniffing glue or something. For context: it was August.
After the meeting we immediately raised our concerns with him and our boss. The deadline was shifted and a freelancer was hired to assist. The PM quit shortly after and a way more competent guy took over. But the damage was already done.
In the end we finished that project in February or March the following year. Client was still happy but this shit triggered a whole clusterfuck of a year. Other projects were lagging behind because of this and we had to push out project after project that had accumulated in our backlog.

I still am waiting for Half-Life 3. 'Nuff said.

Yeah final year project, we were given only two months to plan and develop a system that uses machine learning algorithms and had to make our own AI model at the same time make it such that it can handle multi-tasking activities
I had to skip the AI model part because that it wasn't necessary but it was a forced requirement

A web app (recruiting system) with two interfaces، in a holiday (2 days), without any other information.

No one wants to answer your question because of holiday.

Somehow it worked fine after the holidays, but I redeveloped the system in 3 weeks.