Death March projects

[willendure]

Depends where you sit in the project I guess. Been on a couple of these but being on the Service Ops side they turned out to be a bit of an easy gig up to the point it was forced in to live without being properly ready and I had to do some work. If you are on the hook for delivery or working closely with the Indian teams then yeah, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that. For me they were possibly the least rewarding gigs I've done but with the right mentality and out of the stress zone they can be OK.

I'm in the thick of it and have been the last 5 months. But I don't give a toss any more because I am leaving when my contract is up. So in that sense I can find it funny. They were all arguing in a call today and it was doing my head in, so I just turned the vol down. It is funny to watch all the careful manouvering going on to make sure arses are covered, blame is deflected, bare faced lies are told and believed.

There was a pad of sticky notes on my desk and I numbered them in a countdown for the remaining weeks. Now each monday I tear one off and chuck it in the bin. Can't wait.

[willendure]

PM just booked a meeting every day for 30 minutes for the foreseeable future - time to squeeze those pips! Actually there are a few I will quite enjoy seeing squeezed. Death March to the finishing line!

[Dorkeaux]

I'm currently on a contract that could be described as a death march.
Sadly, in our profession these are far too common.
I remember describing one to my father, an actual engineer. He was horrified at our tolerance for project failure, the antithesis of engineering.

I probably won't be renewing it. But the idea of a contractor "torpedoing" a client's project or otherwise acting against their interests is self-destructive and deeply unprofessional.

There might be some green shoots that come out of this. Perhaps three areas not directly related to the project that could be their own initiatives. I'll pitch it to the client when the dust settles.

[willendure]

Also not renewing. 6 weeks to go!!

Unfortunately I got turned down for the perm job with a US tech company. But I feel inspired that I got through 3 interview rounds. I think they would have taken me, but I stupidly scheduled the last interview for friday afternoon and was brain dead after a long week on the death march, so made a less than stellar impression.

Never mind, there is always something else, some way forward, and it could only be as bad as this worst case so nothing to lose by getting the hell out of Dodge.

[Dorkeaux]

Respect for applying for permie jobs.
I couldn't do it.

I've only been on one permie interview in the last couple decades, and I blew it very badly.
Started talking about Nazis to the HR guy. Don't know what I was thinking.
I was wrong-footed by the complete difference in focus between permie and contract interviews.

For example, I was once brought in as an interim head of department (CEO minus 2!) as a contractor with minimum fuss.
The interview for my permie replacement was painful, complex and very, very time-consuming. Same role!

As a contractor no one has ever asked my what school I went to.

[Ketto]

Started talking about Nazis to the HR guy. Don't know what I was thinking.

This made me laugh out loud in public. If that’s any consolation!

[willendure]

Started talking about Nazis to the HR guy. Don't know what I was thinking.
I was wrong-footed by the complete difference in focus between permie and contract interviews.

For some reason this makes me think of Spud in train spotting having his job interview on speed and just raving on like a loon!

I was also a little wrong-footed which is annoying because what I could really have done with is a few practice interviews to get the hang of it. Had plenty good answers worked out AFTER the interview. I kept giving examples from the current death march project because that was all that was left in my brain by Friday afternoon, and that probably came accross quite negatively. I have so much positive experience I could have drawn on! Oh well.

Latest: Now the testers are inventing new requirements on the fly, probably an ass covering manouvre, but not what you need when you are trying to push you ball of tulip over the line!

[willendure]

Latest: Now the testers are inventing new requirements on the fly, probably an ass covering manouvre, but not what you need when you are trying to push you ball of tulip over the line!

Its ok, apparently its an agile project now, so we just make the requirements up as we go!!!

[willendure]

Its ok, apparently its an agile project now, so we just make the requirements up as we go!!!

I was very amused by the fact that people think switching to an agile project is some kind of short cut to delivery! All agile really does is break the process of requirements -> dev -> test down into smaller pieces, to give a project finer grained steerability. But that comes at the cost of needing a well run process around it, to ensure the requirements are gathered and discussed with end clients, backlog is refined to the necessary standard, and so on. This is a case of, we f'cked up the requirements and design phases and dumped the whole turd onto the developers, lets just call it agile, since we have no clue and agile seems like a suitable label to hide this mess behind!

[willendure]

This just gets crazier.

So I heard rumours that Client Co has already done this integration project previously in some form. Given current difficulties I asked about it as there might be some useful info there. I found references to an older decommissioned project. Turns out Client Co has done this project before. Badly. Kinda failed on it. So this is actually Death March II - The Repeat. Archeology has uncovered the site of the battle of Death March I - The Defeat.




Everybody getting quite narky today. They threw one guy under a bus and gave him a hard time.