Wait. I didn't say anything about making people miserable. And I'm not talking about some weird kind of pressure like yelling at people.

I just mean the normal, almost inevitable kind of pressure that comes from the business situation. Management has to somehow figure out strategies to handle the pressure and it has to communicate these strategies and the reasoning for them to the engineers in a constructive way.

Generally, this is the pressure to be competitive and make money. It does the developers no good if they spend so much time writing great code that the company goes out of business.