Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Author and consultant Ed Yourdon is updating his book “Death March.” He is working on the book online as a type of blog. You can participate by reading and commenting. The instructions for joining are here.

I have joined in the discussion. I like this type of thing – reading something written by a smart person and commenting. Some of my comments so far:

Types of Death Marches: One form of Death march is one where everyone hates to come to work. The office is toxic, people distrust one another, and everyone would rather be somewhere else. This atmosphere is usually created by a manager or several managers. Years of improperly handling disputes, dysfunction (and any other dis-whatever) have led to this.

People won’t leave because the pay is too good, the commute is too good, or they are simply insecure in their ability to find another job. This personal and widespread insecurity also adds to the death march.

Causes of Death Marches: When pointy-haired-bosses read about advances in computer technology and the newer collaborative tools in the airplane magazines, they figure that their people should be able to do twice as much in half the time.

Then there are the economic woes (higher unemployment) and outsourcing to other countries. The PHBoss tells the people, “there are lots of unemployed programmers out there who would be thrilled to be working on this (death march) project. Besides, I can always send this work to India.”

The (death march) programmers understand that this reasoning is probably true, so they put their heads down and trudge onwards.

Somehow, economic misery emboldens managers of death march projects.

I think that one of the causes of death march projects are death march projects. We work on a death march and survive, but we are exhausted. We need recovery time, so we come into the office in bodily form, but only as mind numb zombies.

We are now prime to be hit by the unexpected things you mentioned in the text. We don’t think ahead for the next thing that could surprise us, because we cannot think.