A software engineer I know told me that he’s on his second death-march project this year. We all know the drill: vacations get cancelled, we’re all asked to work thru the weekend as needed, the company provides dinner as an incentive for everyone to stay late.
I’m guessing with the staff cutbacks in IT and increasing pressure from the business to get tangible payback for their IT budgets, that death-march scenarios have played out a lot more in the past couple years than before. If you’ve suffered thru a death-march, how did you handle it? Did you quit in disgust? Did you make little dartboards with pictures of your CIO in the middle? What?
Share your experiences and any advice you might have for my friend, who’s seriously thinking of quitting engineering work because of the frequent death-march projects he seems to get into.
