Well, we know where we're goin'
But we don't know where we've been
And we know what we're knowin'
But we can't say what we've seen
And we're not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out
"We're on the one road. It may be the wrong road. But we're together so who cares!"
"I'm on the one road. It may be the wrong road. But I'm alone so who cares!"
I am going to use this fixed version for my own purposes.
We, the unwilling
Led by the unknowing
Are doing the impossible
For the ungrateful
We have done so much
For so long
With so little
We are now qualified
To do anything
With nothing
I try to keep the same name/idenity-ish across systems. It was originally a collision of names (three people on the team all had the same first name). One got the short form, one the long form, and the Scoobie Do movie had just come out and for some reason, I got "Shaggy". A bit later, had a coworker who was Japanese and my first name is awkward to say to the Japanese sounds, but "shaggy" is fine - except that it was pronounced as "SHA-gie" which turned out to be much less taken as a user name than the traditional form, so I use it where I can.
That order also had Slack and Peopleware by Tom DeMarco (which I'll also recommend).
These are things that are timeless (though Peopleware is on a 3rd edition).
Death marches are often software projects, but I've seen some lawyers on a "death march" case where its dragging on and on.
The ideas of Slack are applicable to every job - though especially those of knowledge workers (the book is likely as good for building architects as it is for software developers). Similar things about productivity and desk space are also true for architects and software developers.
They're good books and interesting things to read... but they're not books about software development as software.
This is a death march - no question about it. The book by Edward Yourdon should be required reading for any who are still at Twitter.
One of the things that is in the book had in it that I recall was a four quadrant grid of 'morale' and 'likelihood of success'(?).
There are indeed high morale high chance of success death marches - and they can be fun to be on. The "we will get this done and it will be glorious" type things.
There are also the low morale high chance of success that just drag on and it is a "we will get this done, and then we will all quit." I've been on that one - it was awful. I can only imagine the low morale low chance ones being completely dreadful and people hoping that it gets canceled before too much longer.
Amazon says that I got a copy of this on August 11th, 2012... and that was an order in which the book I got was given to my manager at the time. The project rolled out in October (before Black Friday code freezes went in effect) and I started looking for new employment in January after the company did its yearly bonuses.