Time-to-market pressure is the pressure to deliver a good product quickly. It is good because it reflects a financial reality, and is healthy up to a point. Schedule pressure is the pressure to deliver something faster than it can be delivered and it is wasteful, unhealthy, and all too common.
Schedule pressure exists for several reasons. The people who task programmers do not fully appreciate what a strong work ethic we have and how much fun it is to be a programmer. Perhaps because they project their own behavior onto us, they believe that asking for it sooner will make us work harder to get it there sooner. This is probably actually true, but the effect is very small, and the damage is very great. Additionally, they have no visibility into what it really takes to produce software. Not being able to see it, and not be able to create it themselves, the only thing they can do is see time-to-market pressure and fuss at programmers about it.
The key to fighting schedule pressure is simply to turn it into time-to-market pressure. The way to do this to give visibility into the relationship between the available labor and the product. Producing an honest, detailed, and most of all, understandable estimate of all the labor involved is the best way to do this. It has the added advantage of allowing good management decisions to be made about possible functionality tradeoffs.
The key insight that the estimate must make plain is that labor is an almost incompressible fluid. You can't pack more into a span of time anymore than you can pack more water into a container over and above that container's volume. In a sense, a programmer should never say ‘no’, but rather to say ‘What will you give up to get that thing you want?’ The effect of producing clear estimates will be to increase the respect for programmers. This is how other professionals behave. Programmers' hard work will be visible. Setting an unrealistic schedule will also be painfully obvious to everyone. Programmers cannot be hoodwinked. It is disrespectful and demoralizing to ask them to do something unrealistic. Extreme Programming amplifies this and builds a process around it; I hope that every reader will be lucky enough to use it.
It is your duty to understand the user, and to help your boss understand the user. Because the user is not as intimately involved in the creation of your product as you are, they behave a little differently:
The user generally makes short pronouncements.
The user has their own job; they will mainly think of small improvements in your product, not big improvements.
The user can't have a vision that represents the complete body of your product users.
It is your duty to give them what they really want, not what they say they want. It is however, better to propose it to them and get them to agree that your proposal is what they really want before you begin, but they may not have the vision to do this. Your confidence in your own ideas about this should vary. You must guard against both arrogance and false modesty in terms of knowing what the customer really wants. Programmers are trained to design and create. Market researchers are trained to figure out what people want. These two kinds of people, or two modes of thought in the same person, working harmoniously together give the best chance of formulating the correct vision.
The more time you spend with users the better you will be able to understand what will really be successful. You should try to test your ideas against them as much as you can. You should eat and drink with them if you can.
Guy Kawasaki[Rules] has emphasized the importance of watching what your users do in addition to listening to them.
I believe contractors and consultants often have tremendous problems getting their clients to clarify in their own minds what they really want. If you intend to be a consultant, I suggest you choose your clients based on their clear-headedness as well as their pocketbooks.
To be promoted to a role, act out that role first.
To get promoted to a title, find out what is expected of that title and do that.
To get a pay raise, negotiate armed with information.
If you feel like you are past due for a promotion, talk to your boss about it. Ask them explicitly what you need to do to get promoted, and try to do it. This sounds trite, but often times your perception of what you need to do will differ considerably from your boss's. Also this will pin your boss down in some ways.
Most programmers probably have an exaggerated sense of their relative abilities in some ways---after all, we can't all be in the top 10%! However, I have seem some people who were seriously unappreciated. One cannot expect everyone's evaluation to perfectly match reality at all times, but I think people are generally moderately fair, with one caveat: you cannot be appreciated without visibility into your work. Sometimes, do to happenstance or personal habits, someone will not be noticed much. Working from home a lot or being geographically separated from your team and boss makes this especially difficult.